Each year, American businesses are confronted with estimates that upwards of $2 to $4 billion in worker productivity is lost thanks to employee office pools around March Madness, the month-long college basketball championship tournament. Conventional wisdom has it that the tens of millions of players may physically check in to the office, but mentally are somewhere else, working at half speed, sapping dollars from their employer.
That single digit billion dollar gap is trivial compared to what the country has likely already seen after a year-long torture test of a presidential campaign, followed up with the looming tenure led by a person whose unpredictability and lack of respect for historical precedent, combined with a filter-free ability to share his half-formed thoughts with the world has everyone guessing what headline will flare up next.
The fidgety and distracted half-attentive employees in corner cubicles who may have been pulling for upset picks to win their bracket are instead replaced by entire teams of workers who are on edge - possibly unsure whether their place in the world is safe, whether their rights are going to be protected as new leaders rewrite and repeal the laws, or simply numb and horrified from the scandal of the day. And, if the 2016 campaign and post-election news cycles have been any hint as to whats to come over the next few years, this feeling, resembling post-traumatic stress disorder, will be felt in some capacity for a large percentage of the population for some time.

_Dont you want to watch something else?"_ -- South Park
If its at all possible to act as if politics were not part of this discussion, leaving aside my strong support for Hillary and revulsion to Trump... putting aside the real life-threatening possibility that he and his team will ignite wars, stir up hatred against people who dont match his criteria of perfection, and the domino effects of reducing health care for millions and denying environmental impacts that threaten the very world... the very spectacle of distraction alone will seep in its darkness, sapping morale and focus.
The volume of noise and conflict around Trump is unprecedented in a connected age, when everyone can consume and share information instantly. And while Twitter has had its challenges, it has become the epicenter for the latest volley of noise from the president elect. Buzzfeed recently said noise around Trump had crested 10 times higher than the previous first family of the network -- the Kardashians.
At this point, even logging in to a social network, be it Facebook, Twitter or any other, runs into the possibility someone is talking about who Trump might be or what he might do. The campaign even brought the debate of whether you could trust news sources to the fore. The entire Web is infested.

Conversations among friends, neighbors, and colleagues either tiptoe around the election or confront it head on, but its always there, in the way the tragedy of 9/11 was on everyones mind for the months and years following the attacks. Its a distraction not just for a few hoops jockeys or degenerates, but for tens to hundreds of millions of people, and wont just last a month, but, most likely, for years.
Maybe this administration isnt going to be as alarming and disruptive as we all predict. Possibly after we all look at this like passing a smoldering wreck on the freeway, we can continue forward, but the rhetoric and policies promised to hit us seemingly have us positioned for a half decade of PTSD, which will impact everyone. This madness wont end with a buzzer beater from Gonzaga.
DISCLOSURES: I work at Google, a perceived partner and occasional competitor to Twitter, which I use constantly. I was also more than happy to donate to Hillarys 2016 campaign.

The Web always promised to bring people together. But just as simply, it can drive people apart, as geographical barriers or partial or full anonymity empowers people to say things or behave in ways they wouldnt in a direct setting.
Accelerated by the new reality of realtime streams where everyone has a megaphone and seemingly everyone is working to "go viral" and make the biggest noise leads to a constant cacophony of shouting on the issues of the day. And of late, as I outlined in my last post about Trumps looming $100 billion productivity crisis, just about every stream and news source is dominated by politics and the impact to people by political decisions.
For those opposed to the Trump teams way of thinking, the daily barrage of news and rumors can be fatiguing. Each morning can bring new horrors of gut-churning policy and more needing to escalate to fight back. This weekends sparked crisis stemming from an ill thought out and very likely racist and illegal refugee travel ban saw rallies across the country and millions of dollars raised to flow into the coffers of charities aiming to help, like the ACLU. (I too donated, and my company has promised to set aside millions to help.)

As colleague Yonatan Zunger warns (and you absolutely must read his post), we will likely hit a wall of outrage fatigue. If there is a steady stream of controversial news that impacts us, or people we know, or people we are tangentially fond of, we will run into capacity limits to be angry and to be heard, as the calamities run into each other. But even if that occurs, that doesnt mean we can act as if nothing is happening at all.
Ive already seen people yearn for the good old days when we could debate data portability, site aggregation, text editors, or even which mobile OS is the best. But at a time when peoples lives are at risk, and foundations we expected to be stable are proving themselves unstable, having a row about the latest geek gadget seems out of place.
Its not that we didnt see this coming. Back in 2006, an ancient eleven years ago, I knew we would see the web accelerate peoples disagreements. People want to flock to their tribes, where others agree with them, and the opposite side can seem evil, foolish or subhuman. Most of the time, theyre not - even as their words are alarming and frightful. We knew when people had an opportunity to polarize one another and their beliefs, they would. And every study shows this - including our unprecedented divisions in government, globally, nationally and locally.
We can use the Web to rally together and raise funds and awareness for our causes, and we will. But while Im excited to see the deep pocketed among us excitedly match donations, a great chunk of society is living paycheck to paycheck, and the access to discretionary funds to hold back the government, an institution that is designed to help them, is simply going to run out.
Until we reach some level of stability and understanding with one another, and are out of a crisis mode, you can expect the all politics all the time streams to continue. Mild apologies.

Amidst all the Apple watch hoopla today, FriendFeeds blog announced the long-ignored social networking pioneer was finally going to be taken out back behind Facebooks brilliant new campus and be put down for good. With the networks acquisition five years behind us in the rear view mirror, and user statistics consistently down, mothballing the once unique and vibrant community seemed only a matter of time, and the time has come.
The closure will be by no means without pain. For the many people who made the site their center for capturing their updates around the Web, from the simplest status and debates to photos, there have been no hints at data migration or export. The hilarious threads with friends around the world are going to disappear. The instantaneous celebrations we had when my children were born, and the despair we felt when friends passed away and were mourned will be deleted.
While the Web may have moved on, those of us most loyal to the service remember its pioneering excellence, with near-instant aggregation and publishing, near-perfect uptime, still completely unmatched advanced search capabilities, the introduction of the now universal Like button, topical "Rooms" much like the Groups or Communities of todays networks, and ability to act as a hub for your lifestream, sending the right updates to the right places immediately.
Facebooks 2009 announcement of acquiring FriendFeed clearly spelled good news for the small and elite team working at the company, but pretty much spelled bad news for those who preferred it to what have clearly been the eventual winners in Facebook and Twitter. Some elements of FriendFeed made their way into Facebook, but there really hasnt been anything like it since. (Google Buzz came close, but thats a different story)

The Social Webs picture in 2008 and 2009 was dramatically different than it is today. Twitter was as known for its uptime issues as for its core functionality. Facebook was obviously on a fast ramp to going public, Google Reader was the starting point for reading the Webs updates via RSS, and we were all looking for smart aggregation sites to discuss the Webs happenings with friends.
Flash forward, and Google Reader (RIP) and FriendFeed are in the bin, aggregation is no longer a thing, and the hottest discussions are around good looking filter apps or private networks with disappearing content. It makes one feel a little gutted to have invested in networks that felt a little bit smarter and were designed for smart consumption and discussion, rather than a flight toward the lowest common denominator.
Any ranting on my part to rescue my photos and posts and content from FriendFeed is a guaranteed moot point, and will fall on deaf ears, no doubt. While Google led the way with the Data Liberation project, and even Facebook and Twitter have archives you can download and take with you, FriendFeed has never made that step, and Id be stunned if they would surprise us now. And while were saying goodbye to conversations that used to spawn hundreds of comments and likes in the matter of minutes, its almost as if we should feel lucky we squeezed out a few more years of engagement after the acquisition, when so many other products disappear immediately after getting bought.
Sigh.
If you were part of the active community that made FriendFeed special in those wide-eyed years, you experienced something Ive never seen with any community since (with occasional flashes on Google+ and Twitter being exceptions). If you missed it, then you missed out on seeing one of the most talented teams ever assembled working on something that was both fun and smart. And that storys final chapter is coming without us ever getting the happy ending we were hoping for. Im not mad, just wistful at what might have been.
Long live FriendFeed.

Just about four years ago, Eli Pariser raised some very real flags about the "filter bubble", concerned that many of us on the Web were limiting our viewpoints by following those people and companies with whom we were most aligned. Our personal positions on politics, sports, and yes, even technology, have us in a constant state of affirmation seeking, and the desire to be part of a group of like-minded people, to reinforce our position and strengthen our decided upon beliefs, that we just might be right. And should somebody in our streams disagree with us, or launch into an off topic rant, we can easily unfollow them, and "clean up" the channel.
At the time, thanks to tools like my6sense, where I was an advisor, and later VP of marketing, I said the filter bubble was "not bad" as options were always there to see new voices. While my6sense may not have been a massive consumer success, it was amazingly smart tool that solved the problem for me. But in the ensuing time, its become even more clear that people, through constant following and unfollowing on our many social networks, are growingly subscribed to homogenous streams, and the content creators, be they bloggers, Tweeters, photographers or anything else, are limiting the subjects they discuss, to continue feeding the faithful.
As someone who gained a following talking about tech, new tools and communities, Ive staked my position on the Web as an early adopter, a cloud proponent, a measurement advocate, and engaged social media participant. I have a pretty good idea of what topics will resonate with my audiences on the various streams, and what wont. I know that my discussing items outside of my bubble are seen as noise to those who have chosen to follow me, and they vote with their engagement, or lack of it.
More than nine years ago, shockingly, I saw this coming, when I talked about a Web divided, where people who espoused a certain view would flock toward an extreme community and not be interested in the opposite view. But it goes beyond picking a side in a discussion. Whats happened is that people set up blinders to avoid discussion of anything else - including the content creators themselves.
Theres a lesser-used feature in TweetDeck, which enables you to view a Twitter stream through the eyes of another user, surfacing public tweets from accounts they follow. During the Baltimore riots, while a huge portion of Twitters audience was living through the accounts through the news media, or sharing their experiences about race and police, the Silicon Valley tech bubble largely stayed silent, as if there were two different worlds that didnt connect. I could log in to TweetDeck and pick any prominent voice in tech and see that, in their streams, there was no talk of Baltimore. Or race. Or Ferguson. While people marched in the streets, and dodged rocks or tear gas, the digerati continued to talk about who was raising money, the quality of pitch decks, or complaints about housing prices in San Francisco.
My tweets about Baltimore arresting police offers or links to why the situation exploded in the first place went unnoticed - while the streams continued to debate the future of wearables or the latest entrant into Unicorn status as a billion dollar startup. It was more than an echo chamber. It was a wind tunnel. And my daily journey into Feedly seemed to be no different than any other time. The same articles were written by the same people, about the same things. The same headlines begging you to click were thrown out there, only to be reshared and retweeted in a rush for page views.

Oh. I see youre tweeting about something thats not tech.

Maybe weve grown fatigued of outrage. Maybe there have been enough dramas and disasters and disappointments that we just dont react publicly. But I think theres more to it. We have been taught, thanks to our constant focus on engagement and numbers, that we have to speak to a niche. VCs talk to VCs. Engineers talk to Engineers. Startups talk about being a startup. Were becoming afraid of expressing a position that may cause a debate. Were refusing to talk about things that are uncomfortable, and were closing our eyes to people who dont always care about the things we do. And I think thats dangerous. It sets us up to further carve out our cliques and become closed minded.
I mildly apologize for the irregular posts here of late. But part of the reason, beyond being busy, or focused on other things, is I dont want to be more of the same. The world is a vibrant tapestry, not monochrome, and I dont want to be the thirty-second person to talk about the same things everyone else is. We should embrace a world focused on curiosity, not compliance.

_Editor’s Note:_ Part 11 in an irregular series of stories from my many years in Silicon Valley. Part 10 talked about the time I left my job for a competitor and rescinded the offer. This time, a story involving industrial espionage, the SVP of HR and way too many lawyers.

If I could show the leads from the lawyers’ lists were gone from our system,
we’d be on a path to redemption.

The day had started innocently enough. I was hosting our company’s public relations firm at the office, as we worked with our product marketing and management teams on interacting with press. At a break, I stepped outside of the conference room and found the longtime senior vice president of HR waiting for me — usually not a good sign.
“Louis, please come into my office,” he said, with a tone that made it obvious this wasn’t really a choice. So I followed.
We entered his office, only to find another man in a suit was waiting. The HR SVP shut the door behind us, and then turned back to me. “Louis, on the date of (whatever it was), did you upload a list of contacts to Salesforce.com from (an account manager)?”
“I DON’T RECALL”
I paused. In my marketing role over the last few years, I had used Salesforce.com practically every day. It was our customer contact tool that hit all aspects of our business, from prospecting, to forecasting and demand generation. So it sounded like something I’d do. But I couldn’t tell him yes or no without looking.
_I heard the words escape my mouth as bluntly as Oliver North in the Iran Contra hearings: “I don’t recall.”_
But I promised to check — not knowing exactly what they were expecting to find. Somewhat shaken, but mostly mystified, I opened up Salesforce.com, logged in, did a query, and found I had uploaded a list of contacts into the system on that date. But it didn’t have any significance for me than any other list or date. It was just one of the regular requests I’d gotten from our director of Sales Operations, who often asked me to do the imports or set up reports in the system that she was responsible for, but didn’t completely understand.
So I went back to the SVP of HR, a little more nervous now, and said that yes, I had uploaded the list on that day. So what was going on?
UNWITTINGLY AIDING CORPORATE ESPIONAGE
It turned out that, unbeknownst to me, an account manager acquired a customer list from his previous employer, complete with contacts and titles, and shared it with his inside sales representative — whose job it was to email and call these prospects to sell them our products. The ISR then sent the list to the Director of Sales Ops, who forwarded the request on to me. So while I had been fulfilling a standard request, _I was, in effect, aiding what amounted to corporate theft._
The SVP of HR was clearly not too excited with me about my role in the upload. But he was more annoyed by the director’s not investigating the source of the list, and her not being in tune enough with Salesforce.com to do the upload herself — not to mention his being beyond furious with the account manager and ISR who had put us in this mess. Unsurprisingly, the suited man in the HR SVP’s office was on the company’s legal team, and our competitor wanted us raked over the coals for the impropriety.
Immediately, on the spot, the account manager responsible for obtaining the list was fired. The ISR, whom I considered a friend, was also fired, knowing what the contacts contained and calling against the list. He packed his personal items into a box, took a very lonely stroll trough the parking lot — and I never saw him again.
RUNNING QUERIES TO SOLVE THE WHOLE MESS
Now I was back in the HR office. Having somewhat absolved myself, our efforts turned to limiting the damage. The press training boondoggle I’d been working on with the PR team was practically a memory at this point. I told them they could leave whenever they were done as I was busy, but didn’t tell them just why I was now occupied.
The HR SVP, and our attorney, wanted to know if I could find all the records that had been uploaded from that list, if I could find out what action had taken place — and if possible, could I remove those records from our company database. Of course, the answer was yes, so long as I knew what questions to ask Salesforce.com.
I started to run the queries, with both him and our attorney looking on. I ran a query showing what Leads had been added to Salesforce.com by my account on that day — _AND CAME UP WITH A FEW HUNDRED_. A few clicks on each lead would show if they had been called, or emailed, if any meetings had taken place, and if we had any resulting sales pipeline in our forecast from the illicit list.
I produced reports that showed how many records were in the system, with both he and the attorney taking note of what I found. I was told to take no action on those records, and to be ready to come back into the office at the crack of dawn the next morning to begin the purge.
WITH GREAT DATA COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY
After a night to repeatedly think over the previous day’s events, I got up early, dressed much better than normal, grabbed my work laptop and headed back into the office to join the SVP, that same attorney, and surprisingly, about a half dozen more lawyers, who represented the competition, and had been sent to confirm we were in compliance. We entered the boardroom, centered with a long table seemingly carved from a massive cedar tree, and I had the projector all to myself.
Whether I could perform the next tasks correctly were central to showing if we were acting in good faith.
My task was clear — explain to everyone in the room what had been uploaded, show how it could be extracted from our main database, and then destroyed forever in a way that was unrecoverable.
After an opening introduction from the HR SVP, I fired up Salesforce.com, ran the same queries as the day before, highlighted the records, and started the purge. As I’d delete 100 records at a time, the attorneys for all sides would mark it. I’d pause for agreement to continue and move to the next set of 100. Soon, the records were out of the main DB, and into the Trash.
Then, with everyone around the table nodding in agreement, I emptied the system’s Trash, so the records were truly gone. Then, the attorneys flipped through hard copy printouts of the offending names and cherrypicked customer data to see if could be found. “Jane Smith of Acme,” they might say. I’d search. _NO RECORDS FOUND._ “Evan Jackson of Key Labs?” _NO RECORDS FOUND._
The Salesforce.com database was clean. I was pretty much off the hook — having shown I had the capability to both get us into the mess and get us out of it. But it didn’t mean our company was found without fault. Those prospect companies on the lists were added to a “Do Not Contact” registry that fell across our entire sales organization for at least a year forward, and had us saying no to many different potential sales opportunities as a result.
In the next few years, the SVP of HR left our company and later became the Executive Vice President at a pre-IPO firm that eventually went public and made him undoubted millions. The director of sales operations didn’t last long, finding her role replaced by her predecessor, who was returning to the company — later telling me how stunned he was that personal keepsakes he’d left in his desk drawers remained untouched while he was away. I stayed another five years or so, exceptionally more skeptical now about importing any leads to Salesforce.com from any source that Marketing didn’t explicitly gain ourselves. And that ISR, according to LinkedIn, seems to have recovered and since enjoyed a solid career in sales management.

The experience was not one I had expected to have when taking such an active role with our customer relationship management system, but _WITH GREAT DATA COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY._ When it came to proving ourselves in a room full of lawyers, we had survived.

It has been years since I wore a watch regularly. Considering I’m rarely more than an arm’s length away from any smart device, I’d weaned myself away long ago — relying instead on my phone, laptop or tablet to give the time. And in the past few years, with many different smartwatch options popping up, from Apple’s offering and an array of Android Wear watches, I’ve browsed regularly, but not yet found the perfect fit for me for both utility and simplicity — until Fitbit announced the Blaze in January.
In the ensuing two months, I’ve been captivated by the Blaze watch.
Most smartwatches fall into two camps really, as I see it — too big or too tied to iOS. While this Christmas, I got my wife the Android Wear powered Moto 360, and she likes it, I didn’t get myself a matching set for two reasons — the first being that I hoped the watch’s profile would get even more slim in a newer generation, and second, I am really seeking functionality that goes beyond what I already get from my various Android devices — instead of just being a mirror of activity I already knew.
THE FITBIT BLAZE WAS DIFFERENT.

Not only did the Fitbit Blaze immediately extend my Fitbit activity tracking lifestyle, on which I’ve racked up millions of steps and hundreds of connected friends over the last few years, but the physical appearance of the device was slim and direct. Clean to look at. Light weight. And it didn’t try to do too much.
The Blaze is, at first, a timepiece, and second, a fitness tracker, easily displaying your daily step totals, heart rate, and calories burned, much like any other Fitbit device, but in a new and attractive way that got my attention unlike any of their other armbands ever have.
Also, in contrast to other smartwatches, the Blaze’s $199 price was actually very reasonable, compared with the least expensive Apple watch at $349 or the Moto 360 Sport at $299. While you can get cheaper options, like the Asus ZenWatch 2 for $149, you’ve got the idea.
So over the last couple months, I visited the Fitbit Blaze site so often it became one of the saved home pages on my Chrome browser’s start page — just in case I wanted to look again. And as March approached, when Fitbit said device would finally ship, I finally took the plunge and bought one.

I bought the Blaze on the 18th and it shipped only two days later.

And — get this. It shipped ahead of schedule. Like weeks ahead of schedule. So instead of having to wait all the way into March to get my hands on the Blaze, Fitbit exceeded expectations, like they always have for me, and the device showed up at my doorstep on February 23rd. So for just over the last two weeks, I’ve been tracking my steps and heart rate during all waking hours on my the Blaze.
Like any good data-driven geek (I work on Google Analytics, so data-driven equals yes), for the bulk of the first two weeks, I wore both my new Blaze watch and carried around the Fitbit One tracker I’ve used for the last few years. I believe Fitbit is the gold standard for step counts and daily activity, so if the two were to dramatically vary, that would not be cool.
From what I’ve found, the watch is within 5% of daily step count from the One. Like any good ego-driven activity enthusiast, my bias as to what number is “correct” is the higher one. But the same 2,000 or so steps still count as a mile and so on.
AS FOR THE FEATURES OF THE WATCH, THEY ARE VERY EASY TO GROK.
The leftmost button on the included band and housing swaps between screens. Or you can just tap the Blaze with your finger and swipe left or right. The first option is their “Today” feature, which captures your step total, displays your current and resting heart rate, your accumulated mileage, estimated calories burned, and floors climbed on the day. You can also swipe track individual exercise activities, like Run, Bike, Weights, Treadmill, Elliptical and Workout. I’m no gym rat, so I probably won’t use most of those, but for others who do, it’s valuable.
The Fitbit Blaze also connects by Bluetooth with your phone, and can show a subset of notifications — namely integration with your calendar and text messaging. While other smartwatches give pretty much every phone notification equal access, the Blaze smartly knows when to stop. I don’t need social notifications or email notifications on the watch. Just alerts that are time relevant.
The true test of any new device is if you use it regularly beyond the honeymoon period — when you’re trying something out and justifying a purchase. After four years of wearing my Fitbit daily, proving my fanaticism and even racking up 100,000 steps in a single day, the device is pretty much an extension of me. It goes where I go and reports on whether I’ve been too sloth or burned off enough energy. I even lost 30 pounds in six months after first getting connected. No other device has had that kind of permanence for me.
The Fitbit Blaze is the first offering that had me consider trading up, and it hasn’t left my side, except to charge every few nights. I don’t need yet another email device, or yet another device to browse Twitter and make phone calls. I just wanted a smarter watch that looked good and pushed me to keep moving. For every Fitbit addict, this is the watch you’re looking for.

Once again, the tech web is aflutter about a proposed change in Twitter’s timeline — as they have finally made a choice to offer more than a simply chronological feed of updates displayed in the order they were posted. While a chronological order of tweets can be considered a hallmark definition of what Twitter is today, and truthfully, one of its most addictive features as each new Tweet rolls in, it’s also a detriment to those who aren’t ready to be constantly hooked to the information IV drip.

My 2010 Summary of a Personalized Web future

Twitter is 10 years old now. That’s fairly mature from a Web services standpoint. Its peers, LinkedIn and Facebook, are 14 and 12 respectively. The next generation? Pinterest is just over six. Instagram nearly six. Snapchat is five. And yet it often seems as people are still waiting for Twitter to make that big leap forward to properly sit at the adults’ table.
_TWITTER AS A MEDIA NETWORK, NOT A SOCIAL NETWORK _

Ex Twitter PR and comms guy Sean Garrett, now running his own firm, commented yesterday that Twitter’s been done a disservice by being labeled as a social company instead of as a media network. Taking that summary seriously, it clarifies one of the major needs for a personal and intelligent ranking of content, rather than a raw feed of the latest updates. Media companies don’t just give you the very latest updates in order, with no external curation. Instead, they sort it, rank it and deliver them from the most important to least important — whether their medium is television, radio, print or online.
For the most aggressive media consumers, like myself, the idea of seeing content out of order may seem like pure heresy. We read every email, read every blog post in Feedly, and generally catch up on Twitter to the point where we left off. Scrambling that up seems abhorrent. But we’re not normal. We’re seeing that from the tippy top 1% of the bell curve, and hoping the rest of the world will catch up to us. But not only won’t they, but they don’t need to, and we should stop expecting it.
A successful network has an obligation to give its users the best possible experience and do it instantly. But surfacing the right updates for the right person at the right time is a tricky Venn diagram to figure out, be it based on the users’ topics of interest, their affection for the person posting the content, the recency of that content, and obviously, a mix of all those signals and more. Just sitting back and showing the latest stuff only solves for one of those qualities: recency — completely ignoring what I like, who I trust and so on.
_PERSONALIZED CONTENT LEADS TO HAPPIER USERS, MORE USAGE _
From 2009 to 2011, I worked with my6sense, first as a third party consultant, and later as the company’s VP of Marketing, before I joined Google. Their app surfaced content from your social streams in a personalized way, just for you, based on your own implicit behaviors — what you clicked on, what you chose not to, how long you read something, etc. The more you used the application, the smarter it got, and eventually, we would know your interest patterns so well, that we could take our user model and apply it to any stream on the web.

my6sense for Twitter

In early 2011, we delivered a Chrome extension for Twitter, which took the smarts we’d developed and displayed the results of that effort on the Twitter website — giving you two options: your standard timeline, ordered chronologically, and a smart, personalized timeline, from my6sense.
By no means were we the first company to try and bring sense to a social stream. In fact, in 2008, FriendFeed (RIP) offered users personalized recommendations as a feature to their service, aimed for those who’d been away and wanted to quickly catch up. But one aspect important to both of these examples is that they gave the user a choice. You could quickly switch between a chronological feed, which was the default, and the smart feed, personalized to your interests. You could always go back.
But as we found out, the more the user visited the app, and the more accurately we could determine their preferences (which we called digital intuition), the less likely they were to ever visit the unfiltered, unsorted feed. If you became accustomed to a curated feed tailored just for you, going back to one that wasn’t seemed unacceptable in comparison.
_QUANTITY ISN’T QUALITY. POPULAR ISN’T PERSONAL. _
So imagine you’re one of the millions of users of Twitter (or Facebook, etc.) who doesn’t check in every day. On the rare occasion you do visit, you’re not seeing a feed of updates from people who matter to you most. You’re instead seeing a feed of updates from people who post the most. And quantity rarely was quality. When your selling action to those most likely to leave your service is to give them something low quality and off topic, that’s a problem. And yet, for many services, that’s the default.
Going even further, what many services provide as an option is a leaderboard of popular or “Top” content. It’s assumed the most engaged content is the “best”, but this alone is far from the truth. If you seek out a stream for intellectual curiosity and news, you won’t get that from viral videos and memes, jokes and celebrity news. But many people go to these services to turn their minds off or to relax, and their goal may be in direct contradiction with yours.
_TWITTER’S SUCCESS REALLY ISN’T THE TOPIC OF DEBATE _
Now that Twitter has gone public and its financial success is being graded quarter by quarter, and Wall Street’s public vote on their valuation is there for the world to see, its success could be easily measured solely by stock price. Amid the hubbub of whether Twitter could sustain a billion person audience, like Facebook, or if it’s exceptionally valuable due to the role it plays in the world’s news dissemination and communication, the reality is that it has to do better both for its current user base and those yet to embrace it. And that requires change and evolution.
Twitter should be personal just for me. So should Facebook. And LinkedIn. And the web at large. And my phone and car and so on. If a dichotomy is set up between something that’s smart and personal against one that isn’t, I know I’m going to give the service a chance to give me a better experience — and if not, I should always be able to go back.
_DISCLOSURES: I work at Google, a partner and occasional competitor to Twitter. I’ve been an active Twitter user for eight-plus years. I was previously VP of Marketing at my6sense, which built a personalization engine._

It’s no secret the stock market has been more than a little bit rough this year. After years of growth and optimistic enthusiasm about Internet giants, promising biotech pioneers who aimed to change the world, and starry eyed hope for unprofitable unicorns, 2016 has seen record setting declines through January, with the average company losing double digit percentages in value, and less fortunate market caps slashed by more than half in less time than Noah and his family were said to have spent on an ark.
But amid the daily headlines screaming with bold red letters, the overnight alerts about instability in China, and debate over whether the low price of oil will halt the rise of the electric car, a few friends of mine and I have been running a parallel stock game of sorts which makes the daily punishments of whiplash just a little more acceptable, and maybe even fun.

When the leader is down 13%, you know it’s been a rough year already.

The starting rules sounded simple: Start with a virtual $100,000 (any number works, but $100k sounds big) Pick ten stocks or commodities Invest $10k in each one, either short or long. Hold those picks for a full year. No trading. After a full year, the person with the greatest balance wins.

We all started with 100k, but we’d all beg to get there now.

The rules, especially the counterproductive block on any mid-year trading or selling, seem simple. And the twelve month horizon may have you believe it’s a set it and forget it game — just plug in the tickers and come back to see how you did. But the reality is far different. Six different people with different backgrounds, who claim to know what they’re doing and have more than an average level of experience in the market, each delivered widely differing picks, and now we’re keeping an eye on sixty different securities, watching how they move in the face of some pretty strong headwinds.
One portfolio bet 10 for 10 on small cap biotech stocks, crossing fingers for a binary spike on approvals from the FDA, but has had absolutely no luck, down more than 40 percent on the year already — needing a near double to get back to par. Others of us picked large cap tech leaders like Google, Facebook, Netflix, Apple and Amazon, and have also seen declines around 20%. Solar picks like SolarCity, SunEdison and SunRun? Down 33%. One contrarian portfolio is hoping for turnarounds from Yahoo!, HP, Chipotle and Yelp! and faring no better. Pretty much the only things that have kept above water in 2016 are retail picks like Macy’s and Walmart, old media like Time Warner, and a few opportunistic shorts.
_(DISCLOSURES: I WORK AT GOOGLE AND ALSO OWN SUNRUN STOCK IN REAL LIFE. NO OTHER BIASES ARE ASSUMED OR INTENDED.) _

The Contrarian Account is Down Too

That none of us predicted a market correction makes us seem more than a little daft, but even though we’ve managed to take $600,000 and turn it into just over $450,000 in about a month’s time, the daily ups and downs and charts created by the automated spreadsheet have turned what should be a tragedy into a thrilling contest that plays out five days a week.
HOW GOOGLE FINANCE AND GOOGLE SHEETS RUN THIS GAME
Stock portfolios are typically a secure and individual endeavor. They’re not made for other people viewing, and they’re not social. But when my dad wagered I couldn’t invest his money better than the 3.5% annual return he expected from a money market account in 2014, I had to find a way to prove I could. And I happened upon Google Finance’s integration with Google Sheets — plugging in my own ten picks that summer, and eventually delivering 10% or so gains on the year. That experience had me getting deeper into Google Finance calls, dabbling with App Script, and setting up the game we have today.
_STEP 0: MAKE YOUR PICKS. _
For this game, I set an arbitrary date of January 1st, 2016, and had all participants enter their selections before market trading on the New Year, so that when the market opened, we were good to go.

Start with 10 tickers and then let Google Finance do all the work in Sheets.

_STEP 1: GET THE PRICES FOR YOUR PICKS. _
Google Sheets supports calls to Google Finance that request the stock ticker, and then a number of variables, like “Price”, “High”, “EPS”, “low52” for the yearly lows, etc. (see https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093281) For example: =GOOGLEFINANCE(“AAPL”, “price”) would return the price for Apple stock. Paste that into the cell and change the ticker for your stock.
_STEP 2: DETERMINE HOW MANY SHARES EACH PLAYER HAS PER TICKER. _
We determined $10,000 per ticker, and divided the shares by the opening price on January first. A simple spreadsheet call did the math for us.
_STEP 3: SHOW THE DAILY CHANGE IN EACH TICKER AND PORTFOLIO. _
The call of =GOOGLEFINANCE(“GRPN”, “changepct”)/100 would show how much Groupon stock has gone up or down by percent each day. That percentage change, against the total value of your shares at the end of the previous day, would deliver the Daily Impact from that ticker. Add up all ten, and you have the daily change by portfolio.
_STEP 4: CREATE BACKGROUND SHEETS TO RUN A SCOREBOARD. _
Now that all the tickers are constantly getting data from Google Finance, and showing the ups and downs each day and over the long term, you can set up three distinct hidden sheets. These sound complicated, but you only have to do it once.
4.1 ) The Master Data sheet. This sheet tracks every ticker in every portfolio and captures their current value. This is done by making calls to each person’s portfolio and the respective cells, like share count, price and gains.

You only have to put these formulas in once, and they’re not really that complicated.

4.2) The All Time script sheet and Daily Script sheets. These are more fancy, as they take data from the Master Data sheet, and auto sort by the most valuable stock pick, displayed it in descending order. This is done using Google Apps Script, with one of these commands: =SORT(‘Master Data’!A2:L41, 8, FALSE) to get all time data =SORT(‘Master Data’!A2:L41, 9, FALSE) to get daily change data That looks crazy, but what you’re doing is making a call to the Master Data sheet, saying you’re looking at all 40 rows from 2 to 41, and all columns from A to L, then ranking by the 8th column, which is the overall gains column, or the 9th, which is today’s change. These sheets make the game more fun.
4.3) The Leaderboard sheet. This small sheet tracks the current values of each players’ portfolios, and how much they’ve gained — both since the beginning of the game, and today.
_STEP 5: GET AS CREATIVE AS YOU WANT_
Once you have every player’s portfolio being tracked in near real-time through the day, you can do practically anything you like with the data.

The day’s action on a red day shows 10 stocks up and 50 down.

We set up a front page which highlights the current leaderboard, from top to bottom, and shows which stocks have done the best all time or each day. And for those who love to watch the CNBC ticker, we set up another page called “Today”, which captures the day’s action, including our total gains or losses on the day, and an eyeball look at how many tickers are up or down on the session.

Fun charts bring color and tell the story as the market runs.

We also set up a page dedicated for charts, to capture how we’re doing each month on the game — which requires some manual work on the last day of each month, but is trivial, and compares each player to another, showing how much we each need to improve to move up the ladder to the next slot.
And on each portfolio page, we got creative with the Finance API and made calls to 52 week highs, lows and how far each ticker is doing from the annual peak.
_WHAT COULD GO WRONG? _
With Google Finance doing all the calls in the background, and the tickers never changing, the game doesn’t need a lot of maintenance from the project owner — aside from the monthly data captures, and any new features you come up with. But the stock market is a tricky place, and you have to watch for complications.
_WHAT IF A COMPANY GETS BOUGHT OR GOES PRIVATE? _
Our answer has been that if a company gets purchased, we would ‘pay out’ the holder as if they owned real stock. An all cash transaction would pay out at the value of the deal, while a stock transaction would get equivalent stock of the acquirer. If a company goes private, the stock value is frozen at the last day it was traded.
_WHAT IF A STOCK SPLITS? _
That’s a fairly easy one, actually, if you see it. For example, if Amazon is at $500 a share, and you have 20 shares, and it splits 5:1, you’d give the current holder 100 shares at $100 a share, and adjust the acquisition price to a fifth of the original.
_WHAT IF A TICKER CHANGES? _
That’s annoying, but we already encountered that with Broadcom getting acquired by Avago Technologies. The calls to $BRCM no longer worked. I tracked down the acquisition details, swapped out the calls to $BRCM in exchange for $AVGO and made sure the dollars matched.
_WHAT ABOUT DIVIDENDS? _
Look. This is a game, so no dividends for you. Sorry.
_WHAT ABOUT INDEX FUNDS AND OPTIONS? _
Index funds are great if you’re trying to be safe, but games are about risk. And options are too tricky to set up, so no. Sorry.
_I DID THE HARD WORK OF GETTING STARTED. HERE’S YOUR TEMPLATE. _
Practically all the Google Finance calls from Google Sheets can be found on this help center page: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093281. I leaned on Reddit a bit to find out how to pull in data on Bitcoin, and asked my colleague Steven Bazyl some App Script questions when I was getting started. But now I have a template that runs itself. If you want to paper trade by yourself or with some friends, you can absolutely take our template, and put in your own picks. And just maybe the market will turn around and we can talk about gains instead of losses!
Here you go: https://goo.gl/YdTalj Have fun and good luck!

For most people, new ideas and perspectives make us uncomfortable. It’s easier and less taxing to surround ourselves with people who agree with our worldview, and reinforce our way of thinking, to make us believe we are correct. We self-select our communities, both in the physical world, and the online space, and these friends or peers become an extension of our own identity.
A byproduct of this selection process is that our communities end up looking a lot like us and behaving like us. Techies follow techies. White guys talk to white guys. Democrats engage with Democrats. While the Internet has a virtually infinite pool of people and ideas to choose from, we easily ignore, unfollow, mute or block those voices and appearances that we don’t identify with or make us question our position.
A DIVIDED WEB
Ten years ago, I saw this polarization coming, saying the web was dividing in what I called a “bifurcation”:

“It is human nature to seek out a community of peers and equals, of those who yearn for the same things or have parallel experience… (and thus) polarized and wholly separate communities will grow and thrive.” — Feb. 23, 2006

As a white male in Silicon Valley for the better part of two decades, my world view is a very specific one. I know that my experiences don’t always match people who don’t look like me, or whose LinkedIn profile looks vastly different. And over the last decade of participating in many different social channels, (Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) my established audience I’ve curated has ended up looking a lot like me. It’s very white. It’s very male. It’s full of people from Silicon Valley, who love tech, and, in most cases, vote Democrat.
But I know that’s not good enough. To close ones eyes to the rest of the world means also closing my ears, and my mind. Last May, I was especially struck, and angered, honestly, by how the Silicon Valley community seemed especially blind and silent on the topics of racial bias in our country’s police forces, which sparked unrest in places like Ferguson and Baltimore. While protesters loudly called for improvements in their world that begged for equality, millionaire VCs speculated about unicorn valuations and other techies complained about high rents in San Francisco — which don’t seem all that important in comparison.
Amid this noise and seeming tone-deafness from the public profiles of many active Valley participants, we have an ongoing cry for help and recognition and value from women in tech, who correctly see an uneven playing field that throws roadblocks at their career progress, polluted by landmines of sexism, bias and the good old boy networks — as well as a call for an expanded level attention to increase diversity in all our ranks, with diversity meaning not just women, but people of color (POC).
EXPLORING NEW STREAMS FOR NEW VOICES
So over the last year-plus, I’ve actively tried to do a much better job of listening and engaging with people who aren’t like me. And this simple act of listening opens my eyes every day to things I may have missed — while making those topics that I might have previously ignored become critically important to me as an individual.

Twitter Analytics shows my audience is overwhelmingly male. Not a surprise.
As I still love tech, and still identify a geek, my bias and interests remains there, but I’ve aggressively opened my eyes and ears to more women voices and more black voices — especially on Twitter, where the following model is very lightweight, and the stream’s recommendation system smartly brings me new people who I may never have previously discovered.
On Twitter, as of today, I follow just under 600 accounts, including brands. But by no means is my stream a perfect picture of diversity and equality. So I created a list that explicitly expunged all the men and all the brands from my stream — carefully only showing tweets from the 170 or so women I choose to follow, as well as those retweets they found interesting (No Men. No Brands.). And by dipping my toe in this curated stream, the view is remarkably different.
While this may not be rocket science, women don’t always want to talk about what the loudmouthed ego-driven men want to talk about. They bring in topics and conversations that often get otherwise lost in the testosterone flood, and introduce me to even more interesting ideas and initiatives. So when the men annoy me too much, I turn them off by following that list instead.
But as I said above, it’s not enough to count my streams as diverse just because I made a list that follows a bunch of women — because diversity means diversity of thought and backgrounds.
DIVERSITY DOESN’T JUST MEAN WOMEN
As the conflicts in Ferguson and Baltimore extended to cover alarming incidents in Cleveland, Texas, and so many other places across the country, those leading the social justice movement, like Deray McKesson, Shaun King, and Johnetta Elzie spoke loudly to me, as did others speaking up about inequality everywhere, like Bianca St. Louis, Jacky Alcine, Yukio Strachan and Trilly Stardust. I started adding them, and each new person brought me a new voice. And, unlike the old days, where the lack of a return follow may have felt like personal rejection, I’ve left the ego at the door, and not expected the same. I have to earn my way into the conversation, and can’t just expect a seat at the table.

In July, I saw many in my stream go in euphoria over Drake and Meek Mill.
But most of you missed it.
Now, it’s not uncommon for my Twitter stream to be overwhelmed by updates from women, and people of color. And it’s excellent. The increased diversity of voices and topics means it’s not a monotonous echo chamber, but one that’s vibrant and has me seeing things I would never likely otherwise see.
All of us who participate online, even if we’re not in tech, have a responsibility to keep our eyes, ears and minds open to people who don’t share the same backgrounds, and may not look like or sound like us. But so many times, that’s the trap we fall into. We may not like looking into a mirror, but we are surrounded by our clones.
WE HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY AND CHALLENGE
My colleague and great friend, Rick Klau, also spoke on this issue last summer in his post “My unconsciously biased address book”, where he stated the downside of keeping our world homogeneous:

If the majority of leaders at most companies are men and if the majority of their networks are men (as mine are), then this is a self-perpetuating problem.

We have an opportunity to choose our networks. When we unconsciously choose for our network to shut out a segment of people, we are doing a disservice to them and to us — and we extend the issues, which are very real, one generation further, rather than confronting them head-on ourselves.
Without listening, we can’t be learning. If you think you’ve built your networks with blinders, take them down. Cast them aside and rebuild. It’s beautiful over here.

Layoffs Are Painful. Even if the X Doesn’t Land on You
(Image: Dreamstime)

In seventeen years of work in Silicon Valley, I’ve only left a job by choice once — in 2011, when I made the jump from being a partner at my own consulting group to join Google. The other three times, my employer informed me my time was up, and at that my services were no longer needed, loyalty be damned.
In two cases, the startup I worked for ran out of funding, and once, the new VP wanted to change things up, bringing in somebody they previously worked with instead of going with the team they inherited. When it comes to a debate between the company succeeding versus your being comfortable, the CEO will never pick you.

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LAYOFFS SUCK.
Layoffs initiate feelings of numbness and outrage, fear and self-doubt. People cry at almost every layoff, even if their jobs were spared. Others yell or curse under their breath as they are escorted out of the building, having already handed in their security badges and seeing their work files, along with hundreds or thousands of email threads, no longer relevant, slip from their view.
I’ve seen companies hire armed guards to patrol the building, in case of retaliation, and once arrived at work the morning after a reduction in force to find a brick had been hurled through the HR VP’s office window, making the premises a crime scene.
Layoffs suck. Getting laid off sucks. Seeing coworkers lose their jobs sucks. Laying people off.. sucks. When a company cuts staff, they are admitting something has failed and needs to change. They’re not growing fast enough. Too many people were hired to do not enough things. Something isn’t working. Today, Twitter laid off 336 people. That’s a lot. Not the 30,000 reported layoffs at HP, but a significant number, one that wasn’t supposed to happen at one of the tech industry’s most discussed companies.
In recent months, gallons of digital ink have been spilled on the frothy technology market we see today. Talk of unicorns and skyrocketing Bay Area housing prices focuses a microscope on the top one percent of success, while many on the outside look in wonder why they haven’t joined the vaunted three comma club. Effort and skill aren’t enough. You need luck too.
I’ve been lucky enough (so to speak) to be present at a number of layoff rounds in my near two decades in the Valley. Let’s talk about it. It’s human.

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MAY 1999
After eight months as an E-commerce analyst at a low-revenue startup during the dotcom heyday, my boss rolled up to my desk in his chair, and in halting English, crowned by his Russian accent, told me the lead investor was done with his little experiment, and we, in two weeks, would no longer have jobs.
His crowning quote: “You and Ferris (my colleague) are laid off. I am fired.”
More: Real Valley Stories: You Stay, Your Boss Has to Go

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JANUARY 2001
Somehow I escaped that layoff with my desk intact. I took a different role with the sister company in the same building. While that was unusual, and I put in nearly two solid years at the company, it too fell on hard times.
Our $1 million in seed funding (at a $10 million valuation) was running dry. By the end of 2000, we were asked to work without salary, waiting for a follow-on round that never came.
A few weeks into the new year, my boss, the VP of Marketing, called me into a meeting to say he was laid off. In fact, all of sales, business development, and marketing, myself included, were done. Only the engineers would stay behind to clean up the mess.
I lingered around the full workday, wasting time on the Internet, until a friend flew into the San Francisco Airport, as we were set to go to MacWorld Expo the next day. He helped me lug my PowerMac G4 and monitor to my car, and I was done. The next day we saw Steve Jobs introduce iTunes.

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NOVEMBER 2001
After a brief three weeks out of work, which seemed like an eternity, I landed at a fast-talking hardware storage startup with $30+ million in the bank, en route to a 72 million Series C round that May, which valued us above $300 million. But our gaudy goals, combined with product slips, ruthless competition and a shocked economy after 9/11 meant we just weren’t meeting expectations.
With rumors buzzing in the hallways for weeks, we cut 15–20% of staff on a Friday after Halloween, said goodbye to our crying coworkers, and were battered by a huge reality check. Our charismatic CEO swore up and down in a mandatory all hands meeting that afternoon in the company breakroom that we would never have to experience this again. He was wrong.

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APRIL 2002
Five months later, we had another all hands meeting. But our CEO was missing. In his place, the chairman of the board, who informed us that he, not kidding, was the new CEO and that our previous CEO was visiting family, in Italy.
There was no mob hit, but the following week, we browsed the Active Directory from our Windows machines at the office, and quietly sat shocked as we saw red minus signs on dozens more of our coworkers, whose accounts were immediately made inactive.
I looked up to see two of my best friends in the hard working Inside Sales team grab boxes at their desk, and punched the cubicle wall.
That afternoon, our Marketing Communications Manager, on his honeymoon, called me at my desk to ask about the rumors. I couldn’t tell him that by the time he got back to the office, he’d be without a job. The next Monday, he packed up and joined the ranks of the unemployed.

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JUNE 2005
Having somehow lived through the post 9/11 recession, raising money when we needed it, and delivering a product that just enough customers liked for us to keep the VC checks flowing in, we were on our third CEO, fifth head of marketing, and fourth sales lead. Or something like that. Our stock options had been reverse split twice, first at a 550–1 exchange, and later, 40–1. They were worthless. So there was a lot of grumbling.
Amidst the grumbling, some things were working. The product was starting to find a niche. A few verticals swore by it. And we were able to raise a series AA - a recapitalization that essentially rebooted our financial valuation, and trashed the cap table, wiping out previous investors.
One of the requirements to the raise? Another reduction in force. But this time, instead of sacking the underperforming or most-recently hired, the company excised the bad apples who talked badly about leadership and expected failure.
When their pink slips came, they were happy to get them, and the company was happy to see them go. My old boss, and the IT manager, who closed his own account, literally had tee times set up at the golf course that afternoon, and groused about how long the layoff was taking, so they could make their appointment.

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FEBRUARY 2009
As I pored over the tech newswires, I saw news that our chief competitor,NetApp, had missed earnings, and cut hundreds of jobs. Our newest marketing VP, the sixth to hold the role, had joined us from the NAS storage giant, so during our sales meeting, I tapped her on the shoulder and gave her the news. Her eyebrows shot up. She got up from her laptop, grabbed her phone and went to the hallway to start making calls.
One of those calls was to an ex-colleague of hers who had been impacted. The new marketing VP’s vision? Bring her old friend in as someone she knew, and give me the gift I’d watched play out in front of me many times — the layoff.
By April, I too got pink slipped and was on my own. My running clock of eight and a half years of loyalty got reset to zero.

You can lament the frequent job changers,

but the company doesn’t have loyalty to you.

In business, and particularly in the insular, navel gazing, Silicon Valley, it’s easy go Pollyanna and only talk about good news. The billionaires. The parties. The VC funds and App Store rankings. On the flip side, it can be easy to demonize the bad actors or complain about traffic, and the ripples of corporate decisions. But the truth is always in the fuzzy middle.
Loyalty is wonderful when you find a passion and team you can believe in. But it can all be discarded in an instant, through a fight with a manager, or a merger or acquisition that sees you as redundant. A stock market crash. A change in heart. A bad quarter.
Layoffs happen. They can make you question everything you worked for. All the thousands of hours you put in caring about the little things that got you to where you are. All the conversations and debates that made the product you own.
You have to reexamine what’s important and decide on a new trajectory. And it’s okay to take time to both feel and to heal. Being emotional is part of what makes us human, even in a data-driven world being taken over by robots. So yes, it hurts, and you are going to be angry. Furious even. But being laid off in 2015, in an active tech job world is a much different event than in the tighter, pessimistic environments of 2001 and 2008.
Twitter’s job losses today won’t be the last we’ll hear from current and past unicorns. Those who ride the highest, like Icarus, can be burned by the sun.
DISCLOSURES: I work at Google, which is an occasional partner to Twitter, and assumed competitor in some ways. I have friends at Twitter. And any examples I use here related to my previous work experience are intended to be accurate, even if I missed a date or anecdote.

As a member of the Google Analytics team, I regularly field questions at events or on our social channels about how online and offline activity can drive results, and what metrics have value. As no two businesses are the same, its critical to determine the status of your company and find if your activity can bring impact to results that matter, be they clicks, leads, registrations, opportunities or real revenue. When the goals are determined, and you have stakeholder buyin, then you can start your work. (See: Measure What Matters Most)

Among the most common questions I see are those around driving visitors to a specific call to action. Most websites have many different routes for visitors to take, and the many choices can be overwhelming. But in some other cases, only one outcome is required, and all efforts should be taken to get the user there.
Nearly 15 years ago, I held a role with the inconspicuous title of eMarketing Manager at a company whose product line was in stealth mode. As we approached the launch date, our small marketing team debated how we were going to handle the first version of our website, and just what our calls to action were going to be.

Most Sites Have Many Calls to Action, Which Distracts Visitors

We knew our product would have a long sales cycle of more than six months, and the average sales price would be north of a hundred thousand dollars per unit. We didnt yet have any customer success stories, and our target markets were an educated guess, based on how we thought the product would perform, and colleagues experience selling competitive products. We didnt even really have photos of the hardware we expected to sell, as that too was a work in progress.
But what we did have was a launch date, to coincide with the announcement of our product and corresponding news coverage. We had to ship a site with our new company name, and it had to give just enough information to keep people interested, even if we couldnt deliver all the details.

After some debate, we decided to make the website a massive demand generation tool, with every page driving us to a single call to action: Sign up for our newsletter. Every page had a button on the sidebar encouraging new signups, and where data was scarce, we had links to the newsletter. Even before wed sent out a single issue, we had thousands of registered emails, ready to be updated.

Our Solution: A Single Call to Action from All Pages

Our monthly newsletter, which shipped with my name as the sender for more than eight years, gave us a consistent customer database to talk to for years, and was responsible, in the long run, for prospects, ongoing communication to soft leads, and updating the press and analysts.
This result was from keeping our mission simple. Instead of trying to dazzle visitors with things to download, an array of phone numbers to call, or videos to watch, we just took the casual visitor coming from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and gave them the chance to hear from us again, so that when our message was ready for them, we would have that channel in place.
When you know what to measure, driving toward a goal becomes easier. And if you dont, not only are you confused, but so are your users. This is a lesson I learned firsthand a decade and a half ago.
DISCLOSURES: I work at Google on Google Analytics, and worked at BlueArc from 2001-2009.

In Silicon Valley, some of the most prosperous cities and most sought after zip codes to live, raise a family and send kids to school, are directly dependent on the proximity to corporate headquarters of the leading technology companies. As some of the biggest companies are running out of room in their headquarter cities, the resulting demand for continued growth is putting pressure on neighboring communities. Sunnyvale looks like ground zero for this next wave.
Cupertino, home to Apple, the most valuable company on the planet, has a median home price north of $1.7 million dollars, up 15% year over year. Mountain View, home to Google, has a median home price above $1.3 million, up 20% year over year. And these high marks significantly trail the more upscale suburban locales such as Palo Alto ($2.44 million average) and Los Altos ($2.65 million average). Quietly sitting wedged between Mountain View and Cupertino, in a state of tug of war between Apple, Google and more companies, like Yahoo!, LinkedIn and NetApp, is Sunnyvale ($1.28 million average). Sunnyvale has not only seen the fastest increase in average home prices over the last 12 months, but is set up to see even more demand as jobs flow to the city. As a biased Sunnyvale homeowner and area employee, this is very interesting to watch.

Bay Area Housing Prices: High and Increasing

As the total land available to new workers entering the area or existing employees looking to leave apartments and find a home near their office stays static, the old rules of supply and demand are taking hold. Sunnyvale home prices are up 23% year over year, at a pace slightly above the surrounding neighborhoods, higher than the aforementioned Cupertino, Palo Alto, Mountain View and Los Altos, but even quicker than Facebooks home, Menlo Park (up 17% y/y), or San Francisco, home to Twitter and many others (up 13% y/y).

So why is this? And who cares? As somebody who has been working in the Valley since the rise and fall of the first dotcom boom in the late 1990s, Ive seen ebbs and flows in the economy impact hiring, funding, area traffic and housing prices. Big names that once were major land owners and employers, like Sun Microsystems and SGI, can virtually disappear. But when large companies present stability and prosperity, they can be a magnet for skilled workers. And in the last two years, you have seen major announcements from Valley leaders, like Google, Apple and LinkedIn, announcing new campuses or building into Sunnyvale, as offices in neighboring Mountain View and Cupertino become saturated.
While much press has been spilt over Apples amazing spaceship campus under construction in Cupertino, what few note is that this work, taking over an older Hewlett Packard lot, is snugly cornered on the border of Sunnyvale city limits, and the company has been snapping up buildings all over the cityto manage growth. LinkedIn has been building sparkling new buildings in downtown Sunnyvale and looks poised to move thousands of workers there soon. Google has made headlines as theyve taken over buildings from Juniper Networks and even took over nearby Moffet Field.
This expanded pressure from Cupertino on the South border, and Mountain View to the West and North, is pushing Sunnyvale costs and demand upward, much like new mountain ranges are formed under pressure from moving tectonic plates. And this isnt to say that Sunnyvale doesnt already have significant employment hubs of their own. The citys largest employers include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Synopsys, Broadcom, Infinera, Nokia, and and many of those Ive already mentioned, like NetApp, Juniper and Yahoo!. But the new occupants in the city come armed with significant war chests and momentum, almost certainly strong enough to ward off any turndown in the hot tech economy or an eventual recession.
The stats are Sunnyvale are fairly pedestrian as Bay Area cities go. The last census reported just shy of 150,000 residents, and a workforce of nearly 120,000. The city has adapted to economic shifts, from agriculture to defense to microprocessing through Silicon Valleys first wave, and now, the Internet. With Google bordered to the East by water and marshlands, and Apple by rolling hills of past Highway 280, the growth point is aiming straight at Sunnyvale. Watch this space.
DISCLOSURES: I work at Google, and live in Sunnyvale.

In December, I wrote about viewing technology through the eyes of a child. As much as I think of myself as an early adopter and with it net citizen, Im equally amused and amazed at the activities my own kids rapidly learn and partake in when it comes to technology and the Web, how things and concepts once considered the future are commonplace. And their eyes, unvarnished by the way things have always been, highlight shortcomings in our software and websites that historically have been designed for fully literate adults on the desktop.

Ive been particularly excited to watch (and trial) YouTube Kids as it has been developed, and have been eager to see it launch today, the collective effort of sharp colleagues like +Shimrit Ben-Yair, +Pavni Diwanji, +Jonathan Terleski and many more. As they wrote in todays blog post, the new YouTube Kids is "the first Google product built from the ground up with little ones in mind." As a dad of three kids six and under, two of whom who read fairly well and a third just trying to keep up, its exciting to see them become the focal point for an entirely new interface.

The YouTube Kids Music channel.

My children, from a young age, have been surrounded by touch-enabled tablets. They expect my laptop (and in the case of my Chromebook Pixel, accurately) to be touch-enabled. They use voice search constantly to find what theyre looking for, and they essentially expect the worlds content to be immediately available. But they tire quickly when apps and sites dont do what they want. That can result in complaints to me, or even a thrown tablet or two from a tantrum.
Without sounding too much like PR-speak, from my own experience, Ive seen the YouTube Kids app to reduce any surprises from me in terms of what my kids are watching, they more easily navigate the app, find channels and shows they want, and generally are pleased to have something made just for them.

Browsing shows on YouTube Kids

If you havent yet tried it out (download on Google Play or iTunes), the app features curated channels, a music area, a learning section, exploration, and the always handy search button. So the colors are bright, the buttons are bigger, and theres no noise in the way.

Browsing the PBS KIDS channel on YouTube Kids

The true measure of whether an app for kids is working is whether the kids ask for it by name, or keep using it instead of getting bored and trying something else. My four year old boy is quick to use the app on my Nexus 9 or Nexus 6, and the twin six year olds are quickly getting used to the new app after lots of their own experience on the standard YouTube app weve all used.

Searching for Minecraft on YouTube Kids

Lucky for us parents who do our best to stay on top of their digital explorations without trying to be overbearing, YouTube Kids makes searching less of a risk. My kids wont go from a G rated topic to an R rated one in a few clicks. Searching for Minecraft (which happens in my house) turns up solid results. And I can even set up the app to run for a certain amount of time before closing, to be used for incentives, or a late evening treat before bed.

Setting YouTube for Kids timer for 30 minutes

At the risk of my once more vibrant blog to be turned into a daddy blog, the quick summary is that this app is a welcome addition to our tablets and phones. Netflixs Kids only channel is smart. YouTube Kids is smart. The next generation is growing up with smart devices everywhere. What they do with them is largely prodded by what we make possible. Thanks YouTube!

A new year is a somewhat arbitrary point in time to mark change. But tradition has it that we do two things when the calendar turns from December to January. We look back on the previous year, either with pride over accomplishments, or dismissal of bad experiences, and we optimistically expect the best for the coming twelve months.
In years past Ive put forth fun predictions for the world in tech. And trust me, I have some predictions, but Ill hold those close to the vest. Working at Google makes predicting the future like cheating. And I wont bore you with a list of my own resolutions for 2015. Instead, Ill suggest (with bias) ten resolutions each of you (and often us too) should take this year to make our online and offline lives even better.
1. PROTECT YOURSELF AND YOUR DATA FROM THE BAD GUYS.
Seemingly every week, we are seeing news about security breaches at major retail stores, or finding online databases have been impacted. And outside the headlines, bad actors are out there trying to harvest your online information. I recommend protecting yourself by using two-factor authentication wherever possible, trying to avoid the reuse of passwords, and setting up automatic alerts that tell you if your credit cards are being used anywhere, or over a certain dollar amount.

In 2014, I managed nearly 6 million steps on Fitbit.

2. USE INTELLIGENT DATA TO MAKE YOURSELF A BETTER PERSON.
Seemingly everyones New Years resolution is to go to the gym more or lose weight. But those resolutions tend to fade out after a strong month or so. Instead, find a fitness tracker or application that makes sense to track what you already do, and find a way to increase those numbers. My adoption of Fitbit two and a half years ago helped me lose more than 20 pounds, encouraged me to buy a treadmill, and find the way to walk just about everywhere.
3. USE INTELLIGENT DATA TO MAKE YOUR HOME A SMARTER ONE.
Once you know to count your data with services like Fitbit, running your home without data is kind of dumb. By adopting Nest and Sunrun to handle our energy costs, and Rachio to manage our smart sprinkler system, weve not only set ourselves up to save money each month, but we can better predict our use, and make changes when necessary.

Our Solar powered home saves money and saves the air too.

4. IF YOU HAVE MONEY, PUT IT IN PLACES WITH LONG TERM BENEFITS.
In 2010, we bought our home, putting out more money than Ive ever done. But with rising Silicon Valley real estate prices, that looks like a good investment. In 2011, we refinanced. In 2012, we paid off our cars and, with the exception of our home, were debt free. In 2013, we bought a treadmill, to keep us active, even if not leaving the house. And in 2014, we made two big expenditures: The first being our Sunrun solar system, which will save us more than $65,000 in the lifetime of the 20 year contract, and the second, paying off a home equity line of credit, which was taking $300 a month, every month. We paid it off 28 years early. This year, were hoping to get rid of our external storage unit, and continuing to take costs off the top.

5. REDUCE CLUTTER, BE IT OF PHYSICAL THINGS OR YOUR TIME.
One of our first world problems is the accumulation of stuff that takes up space. But many of things that occupy space where we live are for temporary enjoyment. I made a choice to ditch physical items for digital ones years ago, and I dont have books or DVDs following me around. Similarly, it makes sense to cut out activities, networks, people or habits that are a time suck for you and may have stopped adding value long ago. Whether its closing accounts, unfriending, unsubscribing, or just walking away... if you truly miss it, you can always add those things back.
6. SEE THINGS FROM ANOTHER PERSONS PERSPECTIVE.
Its easy, especially online, to divide into two directly opposing camps. What you like is amazing, and what the other person likes stinks. But its often very interesting to see why someone has made a choice, be it where they choose to spend their time, what hobbies they enjoy, what apps they use or what mobile or computer operating system theyve selected. It cant hurt to ask and understand before overwhelming them with your bias.
7. RECOGNIZE A LACK OF DIVERSITY HURTS EVERYONE, AND WORK TO SOLVE IT.
There is bias everywhere, obvious or unconscious. The results of generations of bias have led to dramatically skewed workplaces, city makeups, perceptions and manufactured realities. 2014 saw many tech companies open up about their own diverse makeups. Recognizing the issue is just the first step, and being comfortable with the status quo isnt acceptable.
8. DONT READ THE COMMENTS. AND IF YOU DO, DONT RESPOND.
Theres a bell curve when it comes to quality commentary, and the fringes of that curve are in charge of most active conversations, be it on mainstream media sites, popular discussion boards, or video networks. Practically every time, you lose brain cells by reading them, and engaging just makes you part of the mess.
9. DO SOMETHING GOOD FOR PEOPLE WHO NEED THE HELP MORE THAN YOU DO.
Not everyone feels like they can give money to charity, but practically everyone has time. 2014 saw many of my friends get cancer. Another friend lost his 11 year old son to heart disease. Close friends suffered job losses, divorces and messy breakups. The world got Ebola. Adult problems can be a real pain. Find a cause or lend an ear to a friend that needs the help and always be there. The time you give is better than money.
10. EVALUATE WHAT YOUVE ALWAYS BEEN TAUGHT AND CONSIDER WHETHER ITS TRUE.
Much like bias can be taught from one generation to the next, so can half-truths and pure make believe, from pseudoscience to religion, political leanings and the latest version of history, depending on the author. Put two people in a room and ask them a direct question on a challenging topic, and youll get wildly different answers. Find out why youd state yours, and see if a little research could make you update your story.
Starting here, even if you cant get to them all, will have a big impact on you - online and offline, with health, with finance, and well being. You could give yourself a crazy goal that sets you up for disappointment, or you could just start with these. Im working on each one and have a lot more to do. Good luck to you in 2015.

My children have never known a world without high speed Internet, streaming movies on demand, and a seemingly all-knowing personal assistant, available to answer their every question when asked. Theyve grown accustomed to concepts which once seemed fanciful, like the ability to order all sorts of items on your tablet and have them delivered in the same day, having every photo youve ever taken available to you from any device, or having video chats with just about anyone instantly. For them, there is no such thing as technology. Theres just the real world, which is directly impacted by pervasive Internet.

As the major enabler of this, and someone who largely has converted from analog to digital at every opportunity, Ive been especially excited to see how this impacts the way they interact with each other, what they choose to learn, and how quickly they grasp ideas - even when, to them, there is no user manual. Im naturally curious to see what they choose to do and choose not to do, and what simply proves too hard.

My twins are now six years old, and Braden (pictured) is four. The twins are in first grade, and Braden is in preschool. The older two can read well, and do some writing, but while Braden recognizes letters, its not as if hes sitting down with a good book yet. Despite the mild illiteracy, all three can breeze through tablet usage - from memorizing a pin or lockscreen, to finding applications, launching apps, moving them to folders, and even downloading new ones from the Google Play store. And its not far-fetched to say Braden is actively learning to read from applications youd never expect, like Major League Baseballs At Bat, where hes working hard to memorize stats and names of players Ive never even heard of. (See also: Wired: How Videogames Like Minecraft Actually Help Kids Learn to Read)

Braden Seeing Baseball Highlights from the Majors on my Nexus 7

Given my kids capabilities, it should come as no surprise that their primary interaction with the Web is through touch on tablet or phones. They were exposed to iPads and Android tablets early on, and have grown familiar with the practice of touching an icon to launch and app and how to navigate the apps - including the always important ability to hit the small X in a corner to close ads. And when the app isnt what they are looking for, they just ask Google. Depending on how well they ask, Google should find them what they want, whether they are looking for "videos of cupcakes", "pictures of beagles" or whatever strikes their fancy that day.

Itd be easy to say kids, like us, use technology to be entertained. They each have favorite games, and frequently open Netflix or YouTube to watch videos - or, as Braden does, the MLB At Bat app, to see highlights from all of the previous days games. But they also use applications to draw, or for education, whether they are matching games, flashcards, or adventures that teach them language or math. And on more than one occasion, Ive found my Google Express shopping cart full, with hundreds of dollars of items, from everything to do with Disneys Frozen or Minecraft, to books, toys and food. Luckily, they havent yet figured out the last steps of the purchase, so Ive always been able to clear the cart before having to explain away crazy charges.

Sarah posts to YouTube, complete with titles and emoji.

Theyve each also figured out the tablets and phones are capable of creative work as well. I was recently surprised with an email notifying me that Id successfully uploaded three new videos to YouTube. After momentarily thinking Id been hacked, I realized my daughter had not only filmed three new videos, but correctly titled them and uploaded them to my account. Meanwhile, the automatic backup capabilities of Google+ come in handy when we want to see pictures the kids have taken with our devices, from their perspective. Sarah has also been known to tell me to take a photo of something shes proud of, with the intent of my sharing it on Google+ or Facebook, saying "Daddy, take my picture and put it on the Internet."

"My" invite to Brian to join Ingress, sent by Braden.

Last week, just before I wrote my post about Ingress, I got a note from my friend Brian Fitzpatrick, thanking me for inviting him to the game. But I hadnt. Braden did. While I was at the office, Braden had opened up Ingress, sent off a dozen or so invitations to people in my address book, and unhelpfully, dropped some of my equipment into the front yard, for me to reacquire when I got home. That was amusing, and luckily for me, he didnt mess up my account any further. And this Sunday, Braden jacked up our thermostat to 82 degrees, using the Nest app, before I realized things were more than a bit toasty.

On Sunday, we were a comfortable 80 degrees in our house. Thanks, Braden.

Just as important as seeing what theyre doing with my devices is seeing what they arent doing. Aside from the Ingress invites, Ive never seen the kids interested in opening up Gmail, or posting to any of my social networks. No fun tweets or posts to delete. No mass apologies to coworkers for toddler missives to internal mailing lists, and no inadvertent likes of odd posts in the stream. Theyre not interested in Google Drive or browsing the Web, and theyve only fired up Sonos to blast music in our house a couple times. For them, the tablets are purpose driven. They have a short time to delivery of the content theyre looking for, and if they cant find it, theyll ask Google in a different way, or go back to what they know works.

Just like many of us find we struggle with handwriting after years of regular typing, Im interested to see how my kids are going to operate with analog assignments that may require pencil and paper, or if textbooks might be the rule, instead of downloadable equivalents. Im curious to see if theyll master speed typing at a faster age than I did, thanks to the availability of computers, or if touch and voice will rule the day so they might not have to make it a priority. But for now, theyre especially handy on the tablet - be it a 5 inch phone, or my Nexus 9, which Braden calls my "big tablet", as opposed to my "medium tablet" Nexus 7. And as Google Now improves, time between what they want and what they find should even further decrease. Its a lot of fun to watch.

DISCLOSURES: I work at Google and enjoy products of ours I mentioned in the post, from Android to YouTube, Gooogle Drive, Gmail and Ingress. So do my kids.

Last week, I introduced a crazy and audacious goal, of knocking out 100,000 steps (as measured by Fitbit), in the name of personal achievement and to raise money for Camp Taylor, a summer camp for children with heart disease, in honor of colleague Ken Nortons son, Riley. And Im beyond happy to say our adventure was a success.
As chronicled on all the social channels (Twitter, Facebook and Google+ for starters), +Stephen Mack and I passed the 100,000 mark shortly before 10 pm Monday night, after 16 hours of pavement pounding fun that covered more than 46 miles - seeing us start before dawn, and keep pressing forward until daylight was a distant memory. And better yet, our efforts were not in vain as many of you were eager to support us through nearly $5,000 in donations to Camp Taylor, beating our target of $4,500.

Our fundraising goal for Camp Taylor: Achieved!

As I set out in our planning, Stephen and I got nearly all our walking in through three trips along the Stevens Creek Trail, which connects Sunnyvale to the San Francisco Bay through Mountain View, just past the Google campus. We grabbed backpacks with essential snacks and fluids, multiple phone chargers for guaranteed power, and thought ahead - bringing bandaids and Advil for inevitable pain, and head-mounted lamps to break through darkness.

Some scenes from early morning Monday, before the pain.

Our initial pace was quick, as Im accustomed, and Stephen did a solid job adjusting, as we maintained strides through most of the day, even beyond the 10, 20 and 30 mile marks. And we were lucky enough to be joined for much of the journey by friends, each of whom did a lap with us, meaning we were marching in a group of three for about 80 percent of our trek, sharing new pains, stories and sights with one another.

Having walked greater than 50,000 steps a few times myself, I knew I could hit the 100k as a stretch goal, so long as life didnt get in the way, but as our mark neared, I absolutely felt the fatigues and aches that threatened to make finishing difficult. We were each battling aches in practically every part below our waist, and our feet were a mess of blisters and soreness that wouldnt be solved until we were done.

By the 92,000 mark, just an hour and a half away from the proverbial finish line, I was nearly overcome with dizziness and a slight spell where I was a bit concerned Id pass out and fall short. Whether I was dehydrated or had just hit a wall, Im not sure, but with water and about 10 minutes rest, we were able to continue marching, and eventually things settled back to where they were at a good rhythm through the end.

Hitting 100,000 Fitbit steps just before 10 p.m. Monday night.

As my math had planned, we made it back to my house the final time with 99,000 steps complete. We dropped off our heavy bags, and took one last victory lap around the block, reaching 100,000 steps at 9:52 p.m., after a momentary scare that Fitbit couldnt handle six digits and our walk would have been mocked at the very end. My tracker had stuck at 99,999 steps and then jolted forward to 100,007, so no pictures of perfection exist, but we had done it. We wearily high fived one another and then trudged home to call the event a success.

As I told Ken, I promised I would do the full 100,000 steps, and we had done it. Our promise to Camp Taylor, and those supporting us with their donations, or words of encouragement in the streams, was that we would make our full effort, despite fatigue or soreness. And of course, our momentary strains that are nearly gone a few days later are nothing like the prospect of heart disease the youth we were walking for live with each day. So we had pressed on.

Tuesday and Wednesday saw little walking at all, as you can imagine. I completed the Christmas shopping Tuesday and walked around a bit Wednesday, but didnt even crack 10,000 on Fitbit. I hope youll understand. But I wanted to thank Stephen, and his sister Joanna, our friends Roger and Ken for walking with us, and the more than fifty people who donated to Camp Taylor and really had our back. What we did was hard and fun, and it was made easier with a real and virtual team. This is the experience Ill most remember from this years Christmas season.

On Monday, I have a crazy plan to set a new personal record for Fitbit steps. The goal? 100,000 steps in a single day, blowing away my previous personal best by more than 50 percent, and coming close to fifty miles walked - while also helping raise money for Camp Taylor, a free summer camp for children with heart disease, in memory of Riley Norton, the son of my friend and colleague Ken Norton.
Ever since getting my Fitbit and being hooked on challenging myself to walk further and compete with friends, Ive seen the allure of reaching new marks. I had my first 50,000+ step day in December of 2012, and managed more than 60,000 this September, even when I stopped pounding the pavement around 10:30 that night. Ive walked 40,000 steps pushing three kids in a stroller, managed more than 200 flights of stairs in an evening in my house, and know that each personal record simply put the bar higher to make the next mark even more difficult.

But as Ive seen my numbers increase, the math has a strong magnetic pull toward one-tenth of a million steps in a single day. If one averages 100 steps a minute at a good walking pace, its fairly easy to hit 6,000 steps in an hour. Given there are 24 hours in a day, managing 16 hours of walking (plus a bit) to reach 100k is absolutely doable, assuming I can push myself to keep going.
So Ive been eyeing this 100k mark with some anticipation - looking for a day where Im out of the office, where my kids are taken care of, and I can just go, walking in a straight line until the day is finished.
This week, as I told my friend (and TiVo employee +Stephen Mack) of my plan, he said he wanted to join in the adventure as well. Stephen, who I profiled on the blog more than five years ago, has been among my most consistent Fitbit competitors for the last two years, and has yet to see a fun contest that hell turn down - especially if it can keep you in good shape. So weve made plans to set off early in the morning Monday and achieve this goal together.

My comparatively bumpy activity from Septembers 60k day.

To be clear, walking at a normal pace for most of a day is by no means the toughest endurance challenge ones ever seen. Its harder to run a marathon or a 50 mile or 100 mile endurance challenge. Theres no swimming or biking. No weight lifting, beyond our feet. But it requires the will to keep going even if the effort seems monotonous or never-ending. And having a second person there will make the challenge more fun.

The ideal course will allow for us to keep walking all day without crazy hills or interruptions, even as small as traffic lights. We should be close enough to food so we can refuel beyond what we can carry, and have proper rest stops where they make sense. So Ive sketched out a plan for us to navigate the Stevens Creek Trail between Sunnyvale and Mountain View, all the way to the San Francisco Baylands beyond Googles Mountain View campus. With three laps of this trail, we should be more than on our way to the 100,000 mark, and if not, well find a way to get there.

So you might ask... why do this? Are your egos so big that you have to take the whole day for a silly hobby of virtual badges? Are you raising money for charity or something? Well, the first answer is "because we can." The math says its possible, and data exists so we can measure it. And the second answer is also yes. While Im doing this no matter what, its also great to have the wind at our backs by doing this for a good cause. So Ive started a page to support Camp Taylor, and extension, Riley, who passed away in October far too young after a lifelong battle.
Our walk toward inevitable soreness and personal achievement starts in the dark hours on Monday. Ill be posting our progress as often as I can, batteries depending, with the #fitbit100k hashtag on Twitter, Google+ and all our streams. Good luck to us.

A little over two years ago, a small team within Google called Niantic Labs introduced Ingress, a game that adds a virtual reality layer on top of the entire world, which you can claim, defend or destroy for your cause - depending on which side youve chosen. And while I tested early versions of the game while it was developing at Google, and dabbled with it just after launch, I put it aside before jumping back in with both feet two months ago, when a pair of colleagues on my new team couldnt stop talking about it. And now I wont stop talking about it either.
Simply put, in my view, its the most well-designed, intelligently deployed concept Ive ever seen for an immersive experience on mobile, which encourages you to get off your butt, explore the world around you, and find new people to help you achieve goals together. Every facet of the application, even while it seems mysterious, is designed to help you get out of house, to explore new crannies of your neighborhood (and beyond) and discover people on your faction who need your help to achieve what would be impossible alone. Ive never seen anything like it.

Some shots of Ingress badges and live portals.

As you know, Ive been an avid wearables and personal fitness tracking nut for the better part of more than two years. Fitbit has been counting my steps and Moves has been showing where I go. But while Fitbit only counts my activity, it doesnt provide direction or give me a specific mission. Ingress does - making my steps matter, as they are pulled toward each new destination, and seemingly every turn provides yet another opportunity to take down an opponent, power up or build on my own space, or hack away and get new equipment to make me stronger. This combination has accelerated my near-constant walking and movement into personal record highs, consistent leaderboard domination, and Ive fallen way behind in any regular TV watching.
There are many other sites dedicated to the gameplay of Ingress, so I wont go too deep, but at its heart, Ingress is a battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. In the storyline, the Earth has been seeded with exotic matter (XM), and you either believe this XM will enlighten us all, or you will resist it. So from the very begining, you choose a side: The Resistance (blue) or The Enlightened (green).

The Two Factions of Ingress: Enlightened and Resistance

Once you pick a side, you then have three primary functions, much like other multi-player games. You can build sites for your faction, you can destroy the opposition, or you can continually farm for new equipment to make you stronger. This is done by visiting sites, known as portals, which consist largely of landmarks across the world, from water fountains to murals, sculptures, churches and standing structures. If it is something that can shape your mind and appears exotic, theres a good chance its a portal.

Ingress is played globally as teams battle for position.

As one friend of mine tastefully said, you cant play Ingress "from the comfort of your own toilet." You have to move. And in especially dense places with plenty of landmarks, the next portal can be just another block or less away. So if you find yourself out to build, farm, destroy or explore, the only limit to how much you participate is your own time, and how long your phone can hold a charge. Thats led to something of a cottage industry for Ingress players lugging around external phone battery charges so playing doesnt stop short at the worst time.
Now that Ingress has you out of your house, and walking with specific destinations, with the next stop just a little bit further away, youre being stretched. Stretched to find new places in your community you hadnt previously seen, new spots in other cities youve never visited, and it sets you up to be territorial, knowing that particular portals are valuable to you or your side.

The Denver, Colorado Ingress Scene: A Mess of Blue and Green

But if you really want to have an impact, you cant just go it alone. Even the most experienced Ingress player cant build a portal up much more than halfway to full strength, thanks to features in the game that limit your ability to power up portals. It takes two players to take a portal to 75%, three can take it to just over 80%, and in order for a portal to reach 100% strength, it take contributions from eight individual players. So you can deploy and hope, or you need to find people on your side who are often more than eager to help and build, destroy or hack together - spurred on by built-in communications in the app, or augmented through dedicated communities on Google+, Hangouts and other chat tools. There, people will arrange times to meet, secret build or teardown events, or provide updates about activity in their neighborhood.

One Los Altos portal in our neighborhood.

I recently heard somebody say you either go deep into Ingress or you dont go at all. And its probably true. I originally didnt get the attraction, as a low level player. But now Ive seen things I build at midnight before heading home get taken down at 1:30 in the morning, or by six a.m. the next day. Ive started to recognize and greet players on both teams, and you learn the patterns of the game, as one faction gains control over a geography, or specific people just refuse to ever give up, and seemingly play around the clock. And once you go deep, it really becomes a numbers game, as every activity is counted. Every hack. Every deployment. Every link from portal to portal. Every field. Every destroyed opponent portal. The more numbers you get, the more abilities you have and the stronger you are against the competition, and the more they need to be prepared for you.
Joining the Enlightened on Ingress has brought destinations, goals and missions to the activity I was already doing with Fitbit. Its dramatically reduced (even further) my idle sitting time, its made me see and enjoy experiences I hadnt yet gotten to around town and in neighboring cities, and Im getting new relationships with people from a variety of backgrounds, who all hold at least one thing in common - that were playing Ingress, and working to expand the minds of humanity. Its more than a game. Its the true reality. I hope you do check the game out, and see what it does to your daily routine. And while I dont mind more competition, itd be awesome if you saw the world in a new light by joining the Enlightened.
Grab Ingress on Google Play for Android and on iTunes.
DISCLOSURE: I work at Google, and the Niantic team works within Google.

Theres not much a fairly privileged white guy who hails from the suburbs can say about diversity or racism without being questioned. Compared to many other people who dont hail from WASP backgrounds, most of my challenges are pretty easy. I dont come into life fighting against a biased expectation of who I am or what Im capable of. I dont immediately find that people assume Im not smart enough, or honest enough, or trusted enough to participate in their workplace and their communities. Things are remarkably comfortable.
Speaking up or talking about hard issues like racial bias or diversity, or calling for attentiton to inherent problems, makes it possible Ill misspeak and say something quotable where I dont want it. Its instead much easier to sit quiet and let other people fight their battles - to watch big conflicts and flareups remotely, trivializing someone elses experience, as something thats not happening here. But even in the burbs, and in our corporate offices, there are issues. We may not see unarmed men shot 12 times and killed in our hallways, but there are opportunities to bring down or build up our peers daily, and most of us arent doing much to aid their quiet struggles.
Earlier this month, one of my best friends, +Erica Joy, who works with me here at +Google, talked about how bias has worked against her, as a black woman, in a predominantly white and east Asian world. Her piece "The Other Side of Diversity" removes the abstract anonymity of company statistics and tells you the direct reality of what its like as someone who walks into a position where people may have already made their mind up about you, where your mere presence may make them uncomfortable, and where artificial limits are put on your potential.

Ive known Erica for about seven years, and have been colleagues with her for the last three plus. Shes the kind of person who Ive always felt free to open up to and tell her just about anything. Shes clever, insightful and hilarious - if you take the opportunity to know her. Shes also especially thoughtful. She can be a sharp critic when our products dont work well, and she can push back on me if I say something daft that needs revision or clarification. And yet I know not everyone is open to finding out her personality, and as she spells out in her piece, as well as the follow-on "No Solution", her professional career (and personal no doubt) has been impacted, multiple times, by the shortsightedness of others.

While I may comfortably sit on the side where I dont have to fight for inclusion, its incredibly frustrating to see this happen time and again, whether people are strong enough, like Erica, to speak up about it, or they remain in silence. For no matter how you carve up the numbers being shared from our workplaces, we have some obvious gaps in our nurturing, recruiting, hiring and retention practices - which extend a gulf in our representation of women and minorities in tech. This is a systemic issue at all levels, and while I know companies (including mine) honestly are working hard to improve things, the day to day realities cant be glossed over with an expectation of prettier futures.
Sometimes when Erica and I get together, we joke about seeing if we can hit a quota of spotting more people like her (namely black women) on campus - like the proverbial unicorn. If we can find two more (not including her) over a standard lunch visit, weve done pretty well. Sometimes, depending where we walk or where were eating, we see more. Other times, none, as streams of geeky white guys (like me), and assorted people from all other directions walk by.
But it shouldnt be a numbers game. One shouldnt have to try and play "Wheres Waldo?" to find peers who share their same background. One shouldnt have to try and mask their identity to be included, or assimilate as to not draw attention. As I read Ericas first post pre-publishing, as a friendly editor, what struck me the most from her experience was one of her last bullet points:

"I feel like I’ve lost my entire cultural identity in effort to be part of the culture I’ve spent the majority of the last decade in." -- "The Other Side of Diversity"

If you have to change who you are to fit into the culture, maybe its the culture that needs changing. Ive been lucky enough, even as a dumb white guy from the burbs, to have had some experiences in fairly open communities. Im glad I attended UC Berkeley, which was even more diverse when I attended school there in the late 1990s than it is now, and for all its continued challenges, I believe Google has its heart in the right place to empower people from all different backgrounds, and is working on it from multiple directions. While my neighborhood isnt the picture of diversity, Ive always followed and engaged with stimulating people online, no matter their racial makeup.
As a numbers exercise, I did a quick count a week-plus ago of those whom Im connected to online. Of the 246 people Im mutual friends with on Facebook, for example, only eight are black. Thats 3.5%. If I edit the count to remove immediate family members, or colleagues, to only include friends Ive hand selected as acquaintances, that goes up to 4.5%, ahead of the Santa Clara County percentage of 2.9%, but behind the California percentage of 6.6% and the national census of 13.5% or so who self identify as black. And really, what constitutes a good number anyway? I cant look at my social networks, pick a few dozen black avatars, add them to my circles and call it a day. Theres no seal of approval that clarifies whether Im part of the problem or part of the solution.
The Ferguson incident and its ongoing echoes has the topic of race back in the headlines again. And eventually our short attention spans will migrate on to some other hot issue of the day, while the family and community suffers permanent scarring. But for many of our friends and peers, this is not a one day, one week, one summer type of challenge - but a lifetime.
We can abstract the Valleys diversity issues into sets of percents, charts and graphs, and cite our efforts with dollars spent or scholarships awarded, but whatever we do, we have to keep pushing and it starts with a recognition that something is broken, and we need to be aware of it. We need to encourage people who run into these trials daily to speak up, and to please be themselves. We are better because of our differences.

The prevailing mantra holds that as our phones become increasingly smart and constantly connected, that were walking around with the equivalent of computers in our pocket.
These intelligent devices can do practically everything their PC predecessors could, from email and web browsing to document sharing and creation, music and photos, and any application you can think of. In fact, Id argue that were not only seeing people spend more hours with their mobile devices than traditional PCs, theyre more functional as well - as the smartphone has surpassed the PC. Ever try taking photos with your iMac? Its tough.
Now, instead of considering these phones and tablets as miniature computers, which are used to access our desktop content on the go, were seeing the reverse take place. The smartphones are initiating the activity, and the desktop connects us to the results. Instead of many small computers in our pocket, our PCs are essentially larger versions of our phones - and we come to our Web browsers and desktop apps to pick up where our phones left off.

Rachios Web site is as Functional as the App

Not too long ago, it was common to expect apps to be made for our smartphone platforms that were extensions of our Web experiences. These simple mobile apps were wrappers for our cloud-based data, or simply sucked down web pages and media, but didnt offer experiences that were enhanced by being mobile. It was just a mirror of what you could get on the desktop. However, as the app ecosystem exploded for iOS, Android and other platforms, coding for the smartphone became the primary destination and effort for new companies and ideas.

Automatics Web dashboard leverages data from the mobile device.

You could see this evolution go in a a three step process, from "Mobile too" to "Mobile first" and in many cases now, "Mobile only." Mobile experiences cant just be a shadow of the desktop version, but instead are now carefully crafted to meet rigid design expectations, with a user experience that adapts for smaller screens, and gets better with understanding of the users location data or other apps installed on the phone. Were spending more and more time inside of our mobile apps, which can be our primary messaging and sharing vehicle, our second screens while watching TV or using the desktop, or a constant companion - to the point we hold them in our hands as we walk everywhere, or put them out on the table in front of us wherever we may go, waiting for the next chirp to grab our attention.

Fitbit takes its data and makes smart charts and graphs on their site.

The natural evolution of this mobile first, mobile centric reality is that were now no longer going to our phones to pick up where our desktops left off, but the reverse. And when I do end up in front of a full-sized keyboard and monitor, Im clamoring for smart Web experiences in my browser that reflect activities that have happened on the phone. If its a miss, I may end up closing my laptop and picking up my Nexus 5 instead.
For applications that are primarily experienced on mobile, seeing a strong Web interface that contains the same data as on mobile is a pleasant surprise. You can see this difference in the way Fitbit has worked hard to have a great Web experience to mirror mobile, while the Moves app does not. Automatic and Rachio have a workable Web experience to match their mobile version.

Managing the Nest thermostat via the Web - same as the app.

Not too long ago, trying to use the Web and get data on our phones was exasperating. We had subpar experiences, had to make excuses for short email replies, or say wed get to something when back at the desktop. But now, often, when at the PC, youre pining for whats on the phone - even if you can send texts or make voice and video calls from the browser. Its delightful to see when the two are working in sync, and the desktop experience makes the phone experience better. As a user, Id be delighted to see the front-end experience for the same shared back-end data become more in sync and know the devices are working well together for every service.
DISCLOSURES: I work at Google, who is behind Android, owns Nest, and makes browsers and apps for desktop and mobile. I work on the Google Analytics team, which has a great web experience and mobile apps for Android and iOS. (The first version of this post incorrectly said Nest didnt have a strong Web interface. I was wrong.)

The charm of Fitbit has always been more than just counting steps and seeing how far youve meandered in your day. Even more than the virtual badges you can collect for hitting new personal records, one of the most engaging pieces of this smart wearable has been informally competing with your friends for a place atop the leaderboard, learning who is the most active, and seeing just how much further you need to go to land a spot at the top.
With a new feature rolled out quietly last week, Fitbit has formalized these challenges, encouraging you to take on your friends directly.

New on Fitbit: Challenges to Take On Small Groups of Friends

Available on the mobile app for both Android and iOS, Fitbit has started with three separate challenges for you to extract steps out of your fitness social circle - namely Weekend Warrior (for the Saturday/Sunday stomper), Daily Showdown (for 24 hours of high stepping action) and the Workweek Hustle (to get you out of the cubicle Monday through Friday).
The challenges are pretty straight forward. The clock starts ticking at midnight in the time zone of the friend who proposed the challenge. Those who accept the challenge have their steps measured against other participants, and you can see microevents of whos adding on, whether people are practically tied, or if anyone has achieved their own daily personal goals.

You can also challenge people head to head and see updates.

Like any gamified app, the expectation is that a change in the virtual world will deliver a change in the real world. If my friend takes me on a one day challenge, am I more likely to sit on the couch, or go walk a few blocks to make sure I take the gold medal? And for those of us whove amassed large friend lists in Fitbit, due to non-dramatic promiscuity, the challenges act as a way to focus on specific people or a small group. In one head to head challenge, I had a friend with a planned 15k race at the end of the day, who effectively was sandbagging his activity in an attempt to finish first. Unfortunately for him, he finished just short, as my consistent walking was too strong. After all, my competitive streak doesnt have an off mode. Challenge me here. I plan to win.

In the year 2000, as the .com bubble was at its peak, it seemed new tech names were going to rapidly eclipse the old guard. Emails and downloads were new conversation topics, and if you weren’t still on AOL, debates would ensue over which ISP you should choose, or which search engine or portal was the best. Sun was the dot in .com and Linux seemed poised to take over the desktop. Obviously, not everything turned out that way, even if some of the names are still around, and even strong.

The 2000 .Com Monopoly Board

One of the fun collectibles that came out of this time was a .com edition of Parker Brothers’ Monopoly. Instead of properties around Atlantic City streets, you had websites. Community Chest and Chance were replaced with Email and Download cards. And you couldn’t buy property for a few hundred bucks, as everything was in the millions of dollars. Not too soon after the game came out (and of course, I still have it), the .com market was decimated, as the companies of the future weren’t built for the present. Now the game board itself looks like a relic of a short-lived era gone by.

The 2000 List of Companies and Categories

As something of a lark, and thought exercise, let’s consider who would take these 2000 era companies’ spots on the board. I’ll go first with my take on today’s cast of characters.

Commentary: Back in 2000, ESPN, as part of Disney, didn’t have a great approach at owning its web presence. It was part of the Go.com family, one reason it missed the original .com board. Now, ESPN represents sports on all media. Deadspin is an exceptional alternative with sharp commentary that is a must read for serious sports fans. (Apologies to SB Nation)

Commentary: The 2000 edition definitely had a bent toward community. With iVillage and Oxygen, two of the three properties were focused on women. GeoCities didn’t age well and was retired. Pinterest, SnapChat and WhatsApp have become some of the fastest growing communities for pretty much all ages and both genders.

Commentary: Shockwave? Really. Let’s move on. For fun entertainment and burning hours of Web surfing, TMZ, Buzzfeed and Reddit can’t be beat. Reddit is a tough one to categorize, as it calls itself the Web’s front page, but it’s knocked off Digg, Slashdot and others for that title.

Commentary: eBay could easily be a repeat in 2000 and 2014. Priceline and Expedia are still doing fine. But Square and PayPal are how the Web does business these days, while Yelp is often the place to go for recommendations on what to buy or where to go.

Commentary: About.com looks like a content farm, and while CNET’s still alive and kicking, there’s been nothing to talk about since its CBS acquisition. The Weather Channel? Please. There’s an app for that. And more than just finding content sites, anybody can create and share content globally with apps like Instagram, sites like Tumblr and share it on Dropbox. (Apologies to WordPress, Box and others)

Commentary: Monster.com and eTrade were monsters in 2000. I still use eTrade regularly, but they’re not known for their monkey-centric Super Bowl ads any more. Marketwatch is a snooze. Now, people get their financial and business data from each other via LinkedIn, in real time on Twitter, and check its veracity on Wikipedia. (Apologies to Seeking Alpha and StockTwits).

Commentary: In 2000, Search engines took the entire final row of the Monopoly board. But the positions of Alta Vista, Lycos and Ask Jeeves weren’t strong against innovators that got stronger in the next decade. Now, diverse infrastructure plays like Microsoft, Amazon and Apple (for many reasons each) occupy this highly valuable section of the board.

Commentary: That Yahoo! was the Boardwalk of 2000 is telling. Excite@Home was a $6.7 billion megamerger in 1999, but by 2001 was pretty much in steep decline. Without intending too much bias toward my current employer, Google and Facebook are the 1-2 when it comes to the Web today, from the top destinations to hours spent, tools deployed, etc - and both play a role in discovery for everyone.

Commentary: Worldcom? Whoops. Nokia? Whoops. Things change, and companies don’t always adapt quickly. The megalopoly of AT&T is now most like Comcast’s ISP/cable monolith, and Verizon (including their FIOS offering) is the big carrier to be dealt with. Fighting the good fight, and using a ton of bandwidth in the process are Netflix and YouTube, which are essential media mediums on every device.

Commentary: We’re still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop, and Sun is now somewhere in Oracle’s beautiful campus. But while you could take a stab at a language or a platform, like Python, Ruby on Rails, or even PHP, generically its best said that the storing of data and access to that data are the true utilities of 2014. Pervasive WiFi (or 3G/4G) and Cloud power every app and every site.

Summary: The Web is dramatically larger, and more global, now than it was less than two decades ago. This admittedly English-first version of the .com Monopoly for 2014 misses out on the international communities like Baidu, AliBaba and others. There’s no place for the Uber and Lyft rivalry, and while Tumblr was included, it’s hard to put Yahoo! on the board, which probably isn’t 100% fair. I wanted to find a spot for Spotify and Hulu, but failed. I’d be ecstatic to see if Parker Brothers was up for another run at the web centric board, and you know I’d buy it.

Disclosures: I work at Google, which is a customer, partner and competitor with many of the names on this board. Putting them on a Monopoly board is not an opening for the company (or any other on the board) being a monopoly joke.

Buying a new computer or getting a new phone used to be a huge pain. Even if everything was up and running right away, you had to plan for hours, or even days, of moving all your data from the old device to the new one. And if you didn’t successfully complete the data migration, or had sufficient paranoia, you could end up with old devices cluttering your home - just in case you might need to get that old content. But with so much of our data moving from local disks to the cloud, and new operating systems improving their sync and account setup, the day of hot swapping devices is here.
As you know, for the past few years, our home has been a ChromeOS and Android family. This started well before I joined Google, and as each OS gets smarter, that move looks to have been the right one - especially when it comes to this issue.

Samsungs 2012 Chromebook Got Bumped for the 2014 HP.

Last week, thanks to a sale on Woot.com, I purchased a new HP 14 inch Chromebook for my wife. One evening, as she was using the 2012-era 11 inch Samsung Chromebook, I told her to close her eyes. I took her old laptop and put the new one in her lap, and when she signed in, she didn’t miss a beat. All her bookmarks were there, even down to the tabs she had open in her browser. With one move, and for the same $200 or so I spent two years ago, she got a faster device, double the RAM, and a larger, more vibrant screen, with no headaches around data.
There was no question of whether she had to back up photos, or copy her songs. No dragging and dropping off folders and documents. It just worked, exactly as I had expected it to. And the next morning, when she had to print to our networked printer, she just told the browser to print, and the printer was listening. No printer drivers, and not even a memory of a CD-Rom or DVD. It just worked.

Meanwhile, on mobile, the story is much the same. Whether it’s due to an accidental drop (which has happened in our home more than once), or a required factory reset thanks to trying new software before it’s ready (that’s also happened), starting over with a new phone or starting the phone over from scratch is no big deal any more either. Signing into my account brings my account information, access to my data, my apps, and my preferences.
In the storage industry, we used to talk about hot swappable units - which would enable upgrades without reboots or interruption of access to data. The dream of upgrading servers, disks, arrays or network equipment without downtime was rarely achieved, but often talked about. On the consumer side, many of us have grown accustomed to the inevitable pains that come with getting new devices or even upgrading those devices from one system version to the next, and it doesn’t have to be this way any more.
STANDARD DISCLOSURES: I work at Google, the company behind ChromeOS, Android, and great tools that help you sync your content between devices. You can assume I prefer cloud-based data.

It seems fairly logical that if you walk everywhere, youre probably driving less. But even as Ive been on something of a Fitbit kicksince early 2012, Ive reached even higher highs in the last month-plus, and increased my daily goal to 15,000 steps (from 12,000), thanks to one simple change - opting to leave my car at home each workday and benefit from one of Googles most visible perks, taking the company shuttle.
Looking at the data from Automatic, my dashboard shows Im on pace to have set a new low for both miles driven and money spent on gas, this month, a full fifty percent below previous months. And even without the aggressive late evening walks I was orginally doing when losing my extra weight at the end of 2012, my step counts are up more than 30 percent from just a few months ago. You might think thats not worthy of a blog post, but the available data, and correlation from this simple life change is easy to document.

A new low for driving costs in September (via Automatic)

Prior to taking the shuttle, my routine was fairly simple. Id walk the twins to school, drive to work, walk a bit to lunch and do usual scurrying from meeting to meeting, and get home well short of 10,000 steps. To hit my target of 12,000, Id still have to head out at night and get the steps in. But now, after walking the twins to school, I head back home to get the laptop, and walk the mile plus to the nearest shuttle stop instead. I work on the shuttle until reaching campus, and by the time Im at my desk, Ive racked up 5,000 to 6,000 steps. I can easily hit 10,000 after walking to and from lunch, and by the time I head home, Im close to 15,000 steps - good enough for reaching my higher goal. And if I want to head out, be it to walk our dogs or play with the kids or anything else, Im just padding on, getting closer to 20,000 without too much effort.

Hitting 20k on Fitbit isnt an ordeal with a new shuttle routine.

Meanwhile, my poor car is sitting neglected. Instead of driving into work and doing battle with other Bay Area commuters, the shuttle driver is escorting me (and my colleagues) while I catch up on email, keep our social channels updated, and generally get my first 20-30 minutes of work in - while Id probably just be listening to the radio and stuck in traffic on the old routine.
When I first got the Automatic dongle back in April, I was intrigued by it catching me going too quickly or doing other bad behaviors while on the road that might cut into my gas mileage. But with few exceptions, the occasional chirp hasnt really impacted me. If Im on 280, Im going to drive over 70. Its what the road was made for. And if Im driving to an As game in Oakland, theres no question Ill have to hit the brakes occasionally, to avoid making traffic worse. But having the accumulative dashboard is even more valuable. Im not at the point where Id consider getting rid of the car, and sharing my wifes minivan, but there are some weeks where I might not even start the car. Google Shopping Express handles almost all our shopping, and we can walk almost everywhere else.

Earlier this month, I hit 60k steps, a new record. Some day Ill get 100k.

Meanwhile, in Fitbit land, thanks to being pretty consistent about promoting this socially connected pedometer for the last two-plus years, Im continuing to enjoy the daily and weekly competitions, literally around the world. +Thomas Power in London is now tweeting his daily step counts, and harrassing me if I fall behind. In something of a response, a few weeks back I made walking an all day thing, and hit a new personal best of 60,000+ steps. It just took walking on the treadmill while watching TV, and then a stroll to Mountain View after the kids were in bed. It was to prove I could do it, and put the rest of my competition in their place. No car was needed. The new goal? Some day Ill hit 100,000. I just need to get a free day from my wife, and walk around the clock.
So if youre looking for me, I wont be in the car. Find me on Fitbit instead.

Five or so years ago, the idea that one of the most visible bloggers would walk away from their website and completely move their presence to a third party network would have been a step short of scandalous. In fact, when top bloggers even took a month or two off before rejuvenating, that in itself was news. (See from 2007: Are Leading Bloggers Getting Blog Fatigue? and Robert Scobles response) When the well-read and highly networked Jason Calacanis exited the blogging game in 2008, we all talked about it. When PR lead Steve Rubel deleted his blog in 2011, I was not happy.
For many, the allure of instant feedback on social networks, and simple quantifiable levels of engagement are enough to call in quits on longer form content. When a much labored blog post can only score a handful of comments (if any), and a fun tweet gets dozens of retweets and favorites in minutes, or a Google+ or Facebook post has a deep conversation, the return on investment can have you wondering if blogging is even worth the effort.
Last month +Robert Scoble finally abandoned his blog, which, like mine, used to be a lot more active and engaged than it is now. Yet few people noticed. His choice is to primarily engage on Facebook, and continue a presence on Twitter and Google+. And its no longer controversial. In parallel, ten years into +Charlene Lis blogging, she writes, "You just can’t beat the engagement that social media platforms provide, something that blogs on their own can’t do."
Its not as if this is a sudden change, obviously. Blogging was (after bulletin boards and newsgroups) the first deep channel one could have to report news, talk to peers and engage with brands on the Web. But when Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so many other social streams emerged, people learned to communicate in real time. By the time blog posts were published, and traveled via RSS to your attention, you might already have seen the news somewhere else. In effect, social media decimated blogging in the same way that the Internet decimated newspapers. Speed wins practically every time.
Just a few years ago, itd be easy to say "Your blog is your brand (2007)", or, later adjusting, that "Blogging is the foundation in a world of streams (2009)". I still believe deeply in the second part, that all those tweets and social streams have to point somewhere, and if its not an ad, then its back to your blog. The rest is just real time noise that is interesting one minute and gone the next. The blog is the place where you can exchange deeper discussions, and the posts live on forever.

Blog posts I made years ago still get thousands of visits a month.

So what of the perceived decline in readers to blogs that once saw incredible attention? Like in the TV world, where one now has hundreds of specialized channels catering to every interest, which has dramatically impacted traditional network market share, the Internet has many more content outlets to choose from, for practically anything you want. You name a topic, you can find a community for it. And entertainment and soft content are winning, just like they do on TV. People love to be entertained, so even the purported news networks like Business Insider, Mashable and Buzzfeed take a tabloid approach and cater to the lowest viewer - tantalizing and teasing their way through your day.
My good friend and colleague on the +Google Analytics team, +Adam Singer, recently took on the disappearing blogs topic in a column for ClickZ, responding to a Marketing Land post on declining blog use for the first time in seven years. His takeaway echoes what I will constantly report: The best analysis is done for your own domain, you dont have to fight with social networking algorithms on whether your content will make it to viewers, and you own your space - the way it looks, your template, and your message.
In 2011, when Google+ just started, some high profile people said they were walking away from their own self-hosted domains and just redirecting to their Google+ profile, which was flying with comments and +1s. I warned against this move, saying "I Gave Away My Web Identity. All I Got Was a T-Shirt." Even when the product youre pointing to is high quality, its very unlikely a stream-oriented product can match the quality and depth of longer form content that belongs to you.
Having a choice in destinations for your content is important. But its not just enough to engage in other places. You have to tailor your message for each media, and the blog is still your best container to own your brand and your content for the long term. I regularly end up citing stories I wrote 6-8 years ago, and they still hold up. But good luck trying to find a tweet of yours or another social post from 4+ years ago and saying it has the same solid validity. So while I respect +Robert Scoble and others for adapting to a new world and making a tough call, I think weve lost a lot of good voices and deep thought for a quick fix.
DISCLOSURES (PER USUAL): I work at Google, who is behind the Blogger platform (which I use), Google+ and Google Analytics. I do have active profiles on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, of course.